Banner image credit @goumbik on Unsplash.
Our annual Blues developer tradition (see 2023 and 2024) continues! The 2025 Blues Developer Survey is officially complete, and we're thrilled to share what we've learned from our growing (and clearly satisfied!) developer community.
The insights you provide are far more than statistics. Our cloud, product, and firmware teams actively use your responses to shape internal roadmaps and set priorities. We want to know what you're building, how you're building it, and (most importantly) where we can smooth out any pain points.
noteAll results below are presented as percentages of total survey submissions.
Let's dig in!
How likely are you to recommend Blues to your circles?
If you're unfamiliar with Net Promoter Score (NPS), it's a simple yet powerful way to measure customer satisfaction and loyalty. The score is based on how likely someone is to recommend a business or product to a friend or colleague.
Here's a typical scale, where anything above 0 is considered a positive
result:
Again this year our overall NPS came in "great" at 49:
Which IDE/editor do you use most often for firmware development?
We aim to meet developers where they are, by supporting the tools and services you already know and love. This question in particular helps us shape our documentation and guides around the code editing environments you rely on most.
While it's hard to discern from the labels provided on this chart, we are able to group responses together to elicit the following favorites:
- Arduino IDE 1.x/2.x
- VS Code with PlatformIO
- STM32Cube (either STM32CubeIDE or the STM32Cube extension for VS Code)
The net result here is we are on the right path in our documentation, and there is a growing contingent of STM32 users using the new STM32Cube extension in VS Code!
Which silicon family do you most often target for production deployments?
We asked this question twice (once for production and once for prototyping) and the results turned out to be surprisingly consistent. Most of you are deploying to ESP32 or STM32 hosts, with a significant number working across a variety of other silicon families. This reinforces our point: Notecard can be used with virtually any host architecture!
When prototyping an IoT solution, which programming language, framework, or RTOS do you primarily use?
Another question that was asked twice (once for prototyping and again for deploying) and again another question where the results were surprisingly similar! Here, we wanted to learn which language, framework, or RTOS you rely on most when writing firmware.
It should be no surprise that the "C/C++" options (which include bare metal, FreeRTOS, and Zephyr RTOS) came out on top. Arduino remains very popular as well and there are still plenty of you using MicroPython and/or CircuitPython (though there was a noticeable drop off for Python users when deploying in production).
How many devices do you expect to have active in the field within the next 24 months?
How big are your deployments, really? We don't ask this for sales reasons, it's more about understanding the kind of guidance that will be most useful to you.
If most responses showed deployment sizes of just a handful of devices, we'd focus our resources on sharing pragmatic Notecard and Notehub best practices to reduce development friction. But since the majority of you are planning for much larger rollouts, that tells us we need to deliver content that goes deeper into scaling with Blues, covering not just coding, but also the broader challenges of certification, antenna selection, field testing, and more.
Which content formats help you quickly digest IoT concepts?
Not every question yields a clear takeaway, but this one gave us a surprise. We set out to discover which types of resources are easiest for you to consume: long-form vs. short-form video, in-depth online guides, and so on. The result? As a community, you enjoy all of them!
Be sure to keep tabs on our YouTube channel as we are committed to focusing more on video content as 2025 turns into 2026.
Other Insights from the Survey
Here are a few additional highlights from the survey results:
- JSONata usage: The majority of you are using JSONata transforms to shape your data as it flows into your cloud applications.
- Anomaly detection: Roughly half of you have automated processes in place for spotting anomalous device behavior (though many signaled they'd benefit from more guidance in this area).
- Remote DFU adoption: What? Only about 37% of you are leveraging Notecard Outboard Firmware Update for remote DFU!?! A large share still rely on manual updates in the field (or skip updates entirely). This clearly shows an opportunity for us to better demonstrate the value of remote DFU!
- AI usage: While AI tools are making waves, nearly half of you use them for firmware development and data analysis, but not yet for hardware design, testing, or planning.
Wrapping Up
A big THANKS to everyone who took the time to respond to our annual survey. We carefully review every comment and use your feedback to shape our product and service roadmaps for the months and years ahead.
Happy Hacking with Blues! 💙
