A study has revealed that mobile programmers and developers increasingly prefer Android less and are moving more towards Web apps development. These results were revealed by Appcelerator, the company that creates programming tools used by 280,000 programmers. According to its survey, the overall number of programmers who fall in the ‘very-interested’ category for Android development has declined for second continuous quarter.
The decline is not confined only to Android phone development. The number of programmers who are interested in Android tablet development have also declined. It fell from 83.8 percent to 78.6 percent for Android phones and for Android tablet, the number slumped from 68.1 percent to 65.9 percent.
Interest in iOS development has also declined a little, from 91 percent to 88 percent, and stays on top of the list. While trying to explain the decline in Android development, Appcelerator’s principal mobile strategist opined that, ‘ Our thought is a lot of developers are unhappy with the fragmentation of the platform as well as the fragmentation of the monetization platform. Those things make it very difficult if you’re a developer to make money on Android. It’s the versions of the OS and the devices themselves–screen size, feature sizes, even skins that device manufacturers have put on top of that…It’s a tough line for them to walk. They want to have an open OS, but openness means they’re going to have fragmentation.’
The fragmentation has obviously disgruntled the developers since they have to go on to place their apps on multiple market places and also need to make the apps more compatible with multiple platforms. This results in more work and less monetization.
And the obvious answer to this space created by Android fragmentation is fast bei[ttjad keyword=”android-device”]ng taken up by Web apps. Interest in web apps rose to 67 percent, clearly showing that apps built with technologies such as HTML, CSS and JavaScript are becoming a favorite among mobile developers.
Another very interesting aspect of the survey is that an unusually high number of programmers are interest in development for Google+. Whereas the figures stand at 61 percent for Facebook, Google+ was able to bag 39 percent. And that is extraordinary since Facebook is way, way ahead of Google+ in terms of users.
Your pro-Apple bias is showing.
“fell from 83.8 percent to 78.6 percent for Android phones” versus “Interest in iOS development has also declined a little, from 91 percent to 88 percent”
Android declined: 5.2 percent
iOS declinded: 3 percent
You do your best to make a big deal about Android development decline. You even used that in your title. However, you brush under the rug the NEARLY same percentage of decline for iOS.
It is also interesting that you FAILED to point out the RISE in webOS phone development which just may be related to the Enyo framework which is built on javascript and HTML5 which would have supported your observation of an increase in HTML 5 development.