Embedded systems are being developed across industrial automation, automotive, energy management, environmental monitoring, and healthcare. The 2024 Eclipse IoT & Embedded Developer Survey also shows that connectivity, security, and certification remain central concerns. A separate 2025 Zephyr Turns 10 survey adds detail about RTOS selection, memory limits, regional adoption, programming languages, and production deployment.
Contents
- Where embedded systems are deployed
- Operating systems, protocols, and open source
- How organizations choose and budget for an RTOS
- Hardware, memory, and regional adoption
- C, platforms, and Zephyr deployment
- Benefits, risks, and ecosystem participation
Where embedded systems are deployed
The 2024 Eclipse survey presents embedded development as a cross-industry activity rather than a narrow electronics specialty. Industrial automation was a target industry for 34% of respondents. Automotive and energy management each accounted for 29%, while environmental monitoring reached 23%. Healthcare was named by 18% of respondents. These figures describe target industries reported in the 2024 survey; they are not estimates of the total number of embedded products in each market.
Connectivity was the top concern, cited by 48% of respondents. Security was the second-most pressing concern at 35%, and data analytics was a concern for 24%. The pattern puts communication infrastructure first, but it also shows that protection and interpretation of device data are substantial parts of embedded-system planning.
| 2024 survey measure | Share of respondents |
|---|---|
| Industrial automation as a target industry | 34% |
| Automotive as a target industry | 29% |
| Energy management as a target industry | 29% |
| Environmental monitoring as a target industry | 23% |
| Healthcare as a target industry | 18% |
| Connectivity as a top concern | 48% |
| Security as a pressing concern | 35% |
Source: The Eclipse Foundation Unveils 2024 IoT & Embedded Developer Survey Results.
Operating systems, protocols, and open source
Operating-system use in the 2024 Eclipse survey was led by Linux, used by 46% of respondents for IoT or embedded development. FreeRTOS was used by 29%, Zephyr by 21%, and ThreadX by 13%. These percentages represent reported use, so they should not be added as market shares: a respondent could use more than one system.
Communication choices were similarly broad. MQTT was the preferred industrial-IoT communication protocol for 56% of respondents. Eclipse Zenoh was used by 4.29%. Open-source technologies were actively used by 75% of respondents, indicating that open components were part of the working environment for a large majority of the surveyed community.
Security practices also extended beyond a single product feature. Communication security was cited as an embedded security strategy by 40% of respondents, while over-the-air updates were cited by 32%. Safety certifications such as IEC 61508 and ISO 26262 were prioritized by 47%. The certification figure is a reported priority, not a statement that 47% of products had already completed certification.
How organizations choose and budget for an RTOS
The 2025 Zephyr Turns 10 survey shows that RTOS decisions combine technical and organizational requirements. Ecosystem maturity was an important selection factor for 46% of respondents. Hardware support and technical performance each reached 41%. Safety certifications were selected as a factor by 11%.
Product longevity also shapes the decision. A 5-to-10-year embedded product lifecycle was the most common duration, reported by 26% of respondents. For non-Zephyr users, documentation and learning resources were very important to 87%, while maturity and stability of the codebase were very important to 80%. Commercial support options were not important to 37% of non-Zephyr users when selecting an RTOS.
Among Zephyr users, standardizing on one RTOS across projects was the typical approach for 31%. This suggests that RTOS evaluation can affect a portfolio of products, not only a single firmware project. It also helps explain why documentation, ecosystem maturity, hardware coverage, and long-term maintenance appear alongside performance in the survey results.
Cost reporting was incomplete in the 2025 survey. Annual RTOS-related costs below $10,000 were reported by 33% of respondents, while costs were unknown or unspecified for 49%. The unknown or unspecified category is important: the available figures do not support calculating a typical annual cost or a complete cost distribution.
Hardware, memory, and regional adoption
Memory constraints remain visible in the Zephyr survey. A typical 128KB-to-512KB RAM constraint was reported by 32% of respondents. A typical constraint below 32KB RAM was reported by 4%, while 11% reported no significant memory constraints. These categories describe respondents’ typical constraints and should not be treated as a complete hardware census.
Regional responses show different stages of Zephyr adoption. Current Zephyr use in products was reported by 70% of respondents in the United States and Canada, compared with 62% in Europe. In Asia-Pacific, 33% reported active evaluation of Zephyr for future use. Because these are region-specific survey shares, they describe the surveyed populations rather than all embedded developers in those regions.
The comparison below keeps the measurement context explicit.
| Zephyr survey measure | Region or group | Share |
|---|---|---|
| Current use in products | United States and Canada | 70% |
| Current use in products | Europe | 62% |
| Active evaluation for future use | Asia-Pacific | 33% |
| 128KB–512KB typical RAM constraint | All surveyed respondents | 32% |
| Below 32KB typical RAM constraint | All surveyed respondents | 4% |
| No significant memory constraints | All surveyed respondents | 11% |
C, platforms, and Zephyr deployment
The 2025 Zephyr survey shows how strongly C remains connected to RTOS-based embedded development. C was used for Zephyr-based development by 96% of respondents. C++ was used by 30%. These are overlapping usage figures, so the C and C++ percentages do not describe mutually exclusive language camps.
The platform results were also concentrated but not uniform. Thirty-two-bit platforms were used with Zephyr by 91% of respondents, while 64-bit platforms were used by 20%. RISC-V platforms were used by 32%. The figures indicate continued importance for constrained 32-bit systems alongside meaningful use of newer instruction-set and higher-width platforms.
Reported deployment targets varied by region. In Europe, 46% of respondents used Zephyr for sensors and monitoring equipment, and 44% used it for consumer IoT devices. In Asia-Pacific, 46% used Zephyr for consumer IoT devices. In the United States and Canada, 51% reported embedding Zephyr in computing devices such as gateways or edge-AI platforms.
Not every project had reached production. Fourteen percent of respondents reported that their Zephyr projects had not yet deployed devices in production. This distinction matters when interpreting adoption: current evaluation and development activity can coexist with a smaller production footprint.
Benefits, risks, and ecosystem participation
Easier hardware portability was the leading reported impact of Zephyr, cited by 49% of respondents in the 2025 survey. Community and ecosystem support was a reported impact for 36%, and faster product development cycles for 35%. These responses connect portability with both engineering efficiency and broader project support.
The same survey identified significant five-year risks. Maintenance and long-term support led the list at 49%. Safety certifications were identified as a risk by 40%, while onboarding and documentation were identified by 38%. These are perceptions of future risk, not forecasts that the stated problems will occur in every project.
Participation in the ecosystem was constrained mainly by capacity. Lack of developer time or resources was the main reason for not contributing to Zephyr for 63% of relevant respondents. GitHub issues, pull requests, and discussions were the main stakeholder-interaction channel for 60% of respondents, making the project’s public collaboration infrastructure a prominent point of contact.
The survey also records a cautious view of generated code. Seventy-eight percent of Zephyr-contributor respondents said they did not trust GenAI-generated code without heavy review. That result is especially relevant in embedded work, where hardware behavior, timing, memory use, and safety requirements can make unreviewed code costly to validate.
Source for the 2025 figures: Zephyr Turns 10: A Decade of Adoption, Maturity, and Ecosystem Evolution.
Reading these embedded systems statistics
Taken together, the 2024 and 2025 surveys describe an embedded field balancing reach with constraints. Industrial automation, automotive, and energy management are prominent target industries, while connectivity and security rank high among concerns. Linux, FreeRTOS, Zephyr, and ThreadX all appear in reported use, and open-source technologies are active in 75% of the 2024 respondent base.
For practical C programming work, the most direct signal is the 96% C usage figure among Zephyr respondents. It sits alongside tight RAM constraints, long product lifecycles, hardware-support requirements, and concerns about maintenance and certification. These statistics do not establish universal market shares or predict every project, but they provide measured context for understanding why portability, documentation, review, and resource-aware C development remain important in embedded systems.