Brief description
Shiny is and R package, and as such is linked to the popularity of R language. While R is still a niche language compared to Python, it is quickly rising in the academia and the research community in general. In 2014 it was in 4th place behind SPSS (source: Muenchen, 2014), SAS and MATLAB. By 2018, R usage jumped from ~20,000 articles to 60,000 articles (source: Muenchen, 2018). With this continuing growth, Shiny will also increase in popularity. It is unlikely to surpass Dash in the near future but it still remains the first choice for R users.
Long description
Number of related questions in Stack Overflow
24,963 questions in total, 9,091 questions with no upvoted or accepted answers (source)
Relevant forums and chats
The first place to look for help with Shiny is the official RStudio Community, where RStudio developers will monitor and answer questions perodically. You can also check the “shiny” tag on Stack Overflow for existing answers, or post your own question. There are small communities on social media like Reddit (rshiny subreddit), and Twitter with #rstats and #shiny hashtag.
Popularity and main users
Report the number of issues opened in the main repository.
There are 652 open issues in the main repository and 1679 closed (source: GitHub).
R is now the second most used language among scholars behind SPSS. The number of data science jobs requiring R is about half of Python requirement. R is now the 5th most common language in Data Science job requirements behind giants such as Python and SQL (source: Muenchen, 2018). Since Shiny is part of the R ecosystem, it is fair to assume that this is a very popular option but not as prevalent as Python-based dashboards.
Similarly to Dash, Shiny App does not require HTML or CSS knowledge, allowing for a low barrier of entry. However despite its earlier release date in 2012, Shiny does not have as many starts on GitHub. Dash by Plotly quickly rose to success since its launch about in 2014 ago (source: Schmitt, 2020). Shiny currently has 4.6k stars while Dash has 16.1.
It is fairly difficult to gauge Shiny usage in absolute terms, but one article from 2017 demonstrates that shiny is slowly but steadily growing over the course of that year (source: Robinson, 2017).
Shiny is the main dashboard tool for R users. Considering that this is now the second most popular language for scholars and instructors, the academia is the main user of this technology. In addition, researchers in other fields such as healthcare and government (source: Robinson, 2017) as well as some developers also utilize shiny according to the Mastering Shiny book authors. SPSS also features dashboards but they do not appear to be hosted online (source: IBM).
Overall, Shiny app will only be as popular as its companion, R. 2021, R is still in 34th place on GitHub public repositories, compared to Python in 2nd place (source: GitHut2.0, 2021). While some worried about “Python stranging R to death”, this appears to be not the case as R usage rose sharply after a recent decline (source: Datanami, 2020).
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