US and UK enterprises are struggling to meet ever-increasing demands for the development of mobile applications, as companies look to generate revenue with new apps, as well as improve the experience of using existing apps, according to new research.

The research conducted for OutSystems, a developer platform provider, revealed that user demand is driving every enterprise down the mobile route whether they like it or not.

Budget and time came out as the biggest challenges – it is currently taking most enterprises between three and six months to build and deliver an app, while 6 per cent of respondents said it sometimes takes them up to a year. Half of organisations have a backlog of between 10 and 20 apps.

There also appears to be a dearth of the right skills in the market: 63 per cent of respondents said they had somewhere between 11 per cent and 25 per cent of open vacancies for developers as a percentage of current team size.

Other issues included the unrealistic expectations of both businesses and users, as well as the development environment not currently being right for mobile.

“It’s clear that organisations are struggling to deal with a deluge of mobile app requests, multiple platforms to support, hundreds of change requests, and complex backend integrations,” commented Paulo Rosado, CEO of OutSystems.

“To make matters worse, as demand for mobile app developers grows, companies will continue to have a challenge hiring developers. Not only will they be increasingly hard to find, they will also be increasingly expensive,” he added.

The study suggested that enterprises need to find a fast and efficient way to deliver enterprise mobile and web apps, otherwise they will quickly lose ground.