A study conducted by IDC and the mobile developer platform Appcelerator has concluded that Google’s Android OS is likely to become more fragmented as developers continue to shy away from putting it on their “must code” list. Mike King, a mobile strategist at Appcelerator, justified that a steady erosion of interest from developers has been observed in case of Android.
The study covered a total of 2173 developers of the 280,000 using Appcelerator’s platform, with queries targeting their priorities and preferences in developing apps for a certain platform. To confirm these results, a follow up was conducted on 484 developers randomly picked from the earlier pool. The firm has been conducting similar surveys every quarter since 2010 and this new trend of developers moving away from Google’s platform is relatively new. In fact, the same time last year Android was almost on level with iOS and these turn of events is completely unexpected.
The study indicates that a year ago the percentage of developers “very interested” in designing apps for Android smartphones was just three percentage points behind Apple’s iOS (for iPhone) and two percentage points behind that for the iPad. Recent studies have indicated interest towards Android slipping, after reaching a figure of 78% for Android smartphones and 67% for Android tablets.
King points that the study doesn’t merely focus on just private developers; enterprise developers, contract developers and many other groups were also part of this study. King believes the reason behind the drop in interest is mainly because of the problem of fragmentation that Android is currently experiencing. The problem with Android is the existence of different versions of the OS. King deems that if the problem is not tackled effectively, interest in the Windows Phone platform will surpass Android. Android could find itself in a position that BlackBerry is currently in.
Such a decline obviously will not happen in the course of a few months or even a year, because Android devices currently outsell iOS based devices in the market by a decent margin. The main problem that Google needs to tackle is development of apps for different versions of Android. In the scenario that this problem continues to be ignored, experts predict that Android will see a decrease in developer interest while iOS will continue to remain at the summit. Windows Phone is expected to be the biggest beneficiary of Android’s decline in such a scenario.
