Developers are flocking to Android tablets in droves, closing the gap with Apple's leading iPad, according to a report by Appcelerator and market research firm IDC.
The Mobile Developer Report surveyed 2,235 Appcelerator Titanium developers in January on changing priorities and development plans for the mobile industry in 2011.
The report found that Google is nigh on neck and neck with Apple in the smartphone market thanks to a highly successful year in 2010 and that it is making major moves to repeat its success in the tablet market as well.
Developer interest in Android smartphones was up 5 percent to 87 percent, just 5 points short of the iPhone's 92 percent developer mindshare. Many iPhone developers revealed that they were torn between choosing Android or the iPad, suggesting that there is no clear loyalty to iOS.
Windows Phone 7 also saw some growth from 28 percent to 36 percent developer interest.
In the last report in September 2010 84 percent of developers asked said they were interested in developing applications for the iPad. This month that figure has grown to 87 percent.
In September 62 percent of developers wanted to write apps for Android tablets, but that figure is now 74 percent, a substantially bigger increase than that seen by the iPad, mirroring similar fast growth for Android in the smartphone sector. Part of the reason for this huge rise is likely to be Google's revelations about Android 3.0, Honeycomb, which caters more for tablets than previous versions.
RIM's PlayBook also saw some increased attention, up from 16 percent to 28 percent, suggesting that the BlackBerry OS could be onto a minor comeback in the tablet arena. WebOS tablets were also on the radar for some 16 percent of developers.
The leading factor that affects developers decisions to work on Android tablets is cost, with 57 percent picking that option. 49 percent wanted less fragmentation, while 33 percent were impressed with Android 3.0's capabilities.
Developers wanted several new features to be added to the iPad 2, such as cameras, a USB connector and a better retina display.
82 percent of developers wanted to distribute their apps through the Android Market, but 37 percent were interested in using Amazon's Android Appstore.
One area that Google and Apple both lost in was the smart TV market, with developer interest falling 11 points to 33 percent for Google TV and 10 points to 30 percent for Apple TV. Clearly both companies need to make major efforts in this area if it is to take off like smartphones and tablets.
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.
Appcelerator's survey subjects are part of a small minority of developers who are using the Appcelerator Titanium cross-platform development tools which are used in 4,000 iOS apps, which amounts to only 1-2% of the 300,000 apps in the App Store. Not that long ago, Appcelerator was banned from the iOS App store as were other cross-platform environments so what is surprising is that these particular devs were not far more negative towards Apple.
A previous study a few months back by AppStore HQ of every published iPhone, iPad and Android developer currently in the Apple App Store or Android Market demonstrated that there is only a tiny percentage of developers engaged writing software for both Android and iOS:
iOS developers = 43,185
Android developers = 10,199
iOS & Android devs = 1,412
As only 3% of iOS developers target both iOS and Android, it is quite inappropriate to assume that these cross-platform Appcelerator customers represent the views of the much larger iOS development community.
By buying Appcelerator's 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