State of SAP Fiori in 2020 (October)

In this article, we will have a look at the current state of SAP Fiori® in October 2020. This article will not give any kind of subjective judgment, opinion, or recommendation. It is purely intended to give an overview of facts and numbers. The goal is to repeat this analysis in fixed intervals to get an understanding of the progress of SAP Fiori® adoption and development.

However, since it is almost impossible to find reliable, provable numbers of active SAP Fiori® users or installations, we will have a look at “indirect” indicators, like the number of published apps in the reference library or the number of commits on open source repositories.

Total number of SAP Fiori® apps (in the SAP Fiori® Apps Reference Library)

As mentioned above, all numbers are taken in October 2020. The first place to get an understanding of the current state of SAP Fiori® is to look at the SAP Fiori Apps Reference Library. Despite its name, it lists SAP Fiori® as well as SAP® GUI apps in there. Currently, you can find the following number of apps for each UI technology:

SAP Fiori® apps by system (in the SAP Fiori® Apps Reference Library)

The next step is just to look at the SAP Fiori® apps and where they can be run. Over 70% of all SAP Fiori® apps in the reference library are developed for SAP S/4HANA®.

SAP Fiori® apps by Line of Business (in the SAP Fiori® Apps Reference Library)

This chart provides an overview of the number of apps available for different lines of business. The sum of all lines is greater than the number of total apps because SAP Fiori® apps can be tagged with multiple lines of business. Nevertheless, it is clear that there are currently the most SAP Fiori® apps available for finance. Another interesting distinction is between apps compatible with SAP S/4HANA® and SAP S/4HANA® Cloud. Cloud support is trailing slightly behind for most categories.

SAP Fiori® apps by Device Type (in the SAP Fiori® Apps Reference Library)

One important aspect of the design guidelines of SAP Fiori® is the support for multiple screen sizes. Whether this has been implemented consistently can be seen from the available apps per device type. Already, in 2020 there are almost the same number of apps that are developed for tablets as well as for desktops. Phones are lagging behind with about 40%.

Google Search results

Another option to estimate the popularity of a topic is by having a look at the number of Google search results. By just searching for “SAP Fiori” we can roughly estimate how often this is mentioned throughout the whole internet. Additionally, we can search for this keyword only on sap.com, so that we can get a feeling (and in the future the changes) of how often this is mentioned by SAP itself.

Open source development (on Github)

Recently SAP® started to develop tools and libraries openly and provide source code, changes, and issues on public, third-party platforms like Github. Some of these are directly linked to SAP Fiori®, eg. OpenUI5 or fundamental. The amount of development that goes into these open source projects can also indicate the commitment and resources that SAP® puts into SAP Fiori®.

Usage of open source tools (on NPM)

In the previous section, we tracked the development of open-source repositories. Some companies use these libraries via npm. Even though many are not using npm, we can still track the weekly downloads and can get a rough feeling for the direction in which the usage of OpenUI5 and fundamental is developing.

As mentioned in the beginning, we will repeat this analysis in a few months and compare the numbers. Subscribe to our newsletter to get notified when the comparison will be ready.