Android Developers Interest Growing, Catching up to iOS Devices

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Android Developers Interest Growing, Catching up to iOS Devices

When the world thinks of “Apps,” they probably immediately think of Apple’s line up of iOS devices. For quite some time developers were the same way, focusing much of their time on the platform. However, times are changing, and according to an appcelerator survey of 2,235 developers, Android development has reached a new all-time high of 87-percent.

Android comes in at second place following the iPhone at 92-percent and is tied with iPad interest. Which comes in as not too surprising, interest for Android tablets is currently seeing huge growth. With Android 3.0 Honeycomb preparing to take Android tablets mainstream, many developers are realizing that they need to get in on the worlds fastest growing mobile platform.

We fully expect a lot more interest in the Android platform as 2011 comes to a close. First with all of the impressive dual-core devices to be released, Android is sure to be the main “Powerhouse Operating System” for the 2011 calendar year.

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  • Martin Hill

    These survey results are not at all representative of iOS developers as a whole as the vast majority use Apple’s Xcode to write iOS apps, not the software sold by the company that ran this survey.

    The survey subjects were part of a small minority of developers who use a single 3rd party product – Appcelerator Titanium – a cross-platform development tool which is used in 4,000 iOS apps, which amounts to only 1-2% of the 300,000 apps in the App Store. Appcelerator not that long ago was banned from the iOS App store as were other cross-platform environments so what is surprising is that these particular devs still rate Apple highest.

    By buying this software these developers were already planning on developing cross-platform and thus represent a completely biased sample which cannot be extrapolated to the rest of the iOS dev community.

    Other data strongly suggests the opposite of what Appcelerator reports – that iOS continues to garner far more dev interest than Android because that is where the money is. For example, Larva Labs found that “Overall we estimate that $6,000,000 has been paid out to developers for games, and $15,000,000 has been paid out on apps. That is a total of $21,000,000, nearly 1/50th the amount paid out to devs on iPhone. This really indicates how much of a cottage industry the paid Android Market remains, with insufficient sales numbers to warrant full-time labor for paid content.”

    Then there is AppBrain’s findings that over 45,000 of the 100,000 apps in the Android Marketplace are spam apps.

    As such, these survey results are not very useful at all.

    -Mart