Sharing a quick survey result of GraphQL server usage in Japan
GraphQL server usage in Japan
As same as GraphQL community has been growing, The number of searches in Japan has been also increasing. I started using it a couple years ago and immediately felt a free from manual syncing work between backend APIs and frontend calls. But turned out not many web developers surrounding me in Japan use it and that led me to research how many developers actually used it.
Quick survey
I asked my follower “GraphQL server usage” by a quick survey in Japanese for 24h and received 232 inputs.
Visualizing in the below:
Quick facts:
- The majority, 50.9%, aren’t using GraphQL yet
- The second majority, 40%, use stand-alone solutions such as Apollo server and Hasura, and managed services are not used that much yet
Potential blocker to use GraphQL
Then I started thinking why people do not start using it yet. There is a bias of being my follower, but their awareness is not bad since half of the survey respondents have already begun to use GraphQL.
The potential next target user
If I apply the survey result to the Innovation Theory, it means the next target user will be Late Majority will only adopt an innovation after it has been tried by the majority. Then what steps the target user will take to know the successful cases and start using?
User journey and potential actions
When considering developers as OSS users, its user journeys would like the below steps:
- Awareness: See and hear it exists. In this case, it is case study like a major service uses GraphQL at scale.
- Understanding: Get to know why it is useful, what it does and how it work. In this case, case driven how-to article would be helpful for them to know how GraphQL can be used in a similar situation with theirs.
- Taste: Taste how it works and think if it fits to their situations. In this case, building a small feature or app as an example which is similar with their app probably can provide persuasion material for their team meeting.
- Small start: Have a small experience in a real world and see its impact. In this case, using skeleton that has a similar setup of infrastructure with their services environment would accelerate the process.
- At scale: Use it in earnest in real world. In this case, all of the previous steps need to prove if GraphQL works at scale already. The metrics would be scalability, licensing, cost, availability, easy of use and so on.
Conclusion
For organizations where decision making is not easy, such as high security requirements, limited release frequency or etc, sharing more case study would help them to accelerate their innovation through GraphQL.
Last but not least, all of the above assumption is based on my quick survey that contains bias as my followers are web developers mostly.
