It was a bit hard for me to read the information I’m about to report on and I had to read it more than once, but we can’t ignore statistics. However, I have my thoughts regarding these statistics. These statistics are showing that even though Android is flying by Apple with sales, developers are saying they would rather work on iOS than Android. I’m really ready to cry, because I don’t understand why developers would say this!
Well, I did some more research on this matter to really find out why developers are saying this. There is a lot of speculation out there about the matter, but one of the reasons is the fact that Android has too many devices for their OS, whereas iOS just as the one central device that need to be developed for. I can see that being a good reason. However, I still think it’s a mistake.
Let’s get back to this survey. The survey was conducted on about 5,500 developers who voted on what operating system they would prefer to build for, and the top contender was iOS. Another the speculation is that Android is too puzzling to understand. Um, is anyone giggling or laughing at this? There are 2 big apps that developers seem to lean toward for building purposes and they are:
- Apple Maps
- Passbook
One of the big things developers told Appceleator is that they need to have a “large installed base of devices.” However, Android seems to be higher than iOS when it comes to this category, and an example would be the Facebook App, which shows active “daily” users are more on the Android based app compared to the iOS Facebook app. Hmmm, seems to be a confusing statistic to me.
As you can see below, we have 3 things that make a developer choose which platform to build for on a ranking scale.
Again, not quite sure why iOS is the winning contender of these developers. Another speculation thrown out there is the fact developers do not enjoy the new HTML 5. Now, I come from the HTML side of things, and I enjoy website coding, and if you ask me, HTML 5 is much more manageable than the previous HTML coding standards. However how this incorporates in mobile platforms is not something I am knowledgeable in, so I will definitely have to do my homework there because my thoughts are, “They don’t like HTML 5, why?” It’s definitely better to me for coding purposes and currently I come from the old and am learning the new. If you look at the table below you can definitely see statistics show that HTML 5 in mobile applications is not liked at all.
As technology continues to advance, it is also speculated that developers are going to choose to build for devices other than mobile phones by the year 2015. The table below portrays this:
In conclusion, currently developers are choosing iOS due to certain factors, which I can’t seem to understand, but every person is different. However, out of these 5,500 survey participants I just seem to find it difficult that none of them come from the Android Community. Therefore, I question the creditability of these statistics.
How do Android users feel about this? I know there are many Android developers out there that develop as a hobby or volunteer, what are your thoughts? How do you feel about these statistics? We would love to hear your thoughts.
Sources: Tech Crunch / Developer Works