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When talking about a product or project that is still being developed (so it's in an unfinished state at the moment), which expression is the correct one? “in development” or “under development”?

For example:
Our product is in development. or Our product is under development.

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  • I would rather avoid using search engines to verify/prove language issues. Because search engines gather a lot of websites written by non-native speakers or using expressions without contexts etc. A good way could be using text corpora (a huge database of texts which can come from WWW, but they are cleaned and deduplicated). You can try using SkELL which is an online interface based on the 1-billion-word English corpus at http://skell.sketchengine.co.uk This could provide you more proper answers, not only based on a raw frequency which can be misleading.
    – Rodrigo
    Commented Jul 29, 2019 at 9:24
  • Hello, Rodrigo. 'Answers' at ELU are required to answer the question, not to provide suggestions (however admirable) about how to go about getting an answer.
    – Edwin Ashworth
    Commented Jul 29, 2019 at 10:56

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Either is correct, you can meet both versions used for the same context by the same source, for example:

http://www.diabetes.co.uk/research/diabetes-drugs-in-development.html

The header:

Diabetes Drugs and Medication in Development

a listing with description and a header:

The following diabetes drugs are currently under development.

and then immediately after the above:

Diabetes drug treatments currently in development

But if a product is not yet developed, the adjective to describe the status is 'underdeveloped'

As the final proof the expressions are completely interchangeable, use these Google search queries to see results using both expressions in the same situations, remember to include double quotes:

  • "products in development" "products under development" Apple
  • "products in development" "products under development" Microsoft
  • "products in development" "products under development" Google
  • "products in development" "products under development"
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  • 2
    Appple... is this a deliberate mistake?
    – x-yuri
    Commented Nov 2, 2021 at 13:35

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