I know what you’re going to say: “No way.” There is no way Android is ever going to be more important than iOS to developers, nevermind in 2012. But it could happen, according to research team Ovum.
The sprawling Android platform is fragmented, but now that nearly 90% of users are running Android 2.2 or higher, there are plenty of shared APIs and functionality between the OS versions to create great apps. Ovum recently said “Android looks set to replace Apple’s iOS in terms of importance to developers within the next 12 months. However, despite a clear vie for ultimate supremacy between these two platforms, almost all developers support both.”
It’s hard to find Android apps that have not been first developed for iOS, though the opposite is certainly true. Most marquee apps still launch first on iOS, or at the same time on both platforms. There have been games like Wind-up Knight that debuted on Android only to move over to iOS weeks later, but the perhaps that will change in the coming year.
Ovum also says that developers are looking to move into Windows Phone more than ever, due to the increased popularity of the platform. This is directly based on Nokia’s entry into the Windows Phone market with their Lumia devices, and a clear differentiator from some of the other manufacturers who, despite creating Windows Phone devices, seem to place their priorities firmly with Android. “The growing momentum behind Windows Phone indicates that Microsoft has managed to convince developers that its platform is worthy of investment; its challenge now is to persuade consumers.”
There has also been a clear movement to open standards such as HTML5 and Javascript when building applications, though they are still trounced by traditional native coding languages, as they better suit the app environment. Most developers are not creating web apps that can be accessed by any user with a HTML5-compatible web browser, but rather native apps that exist in a sandbox, coded in either Java or Objective-C. That may change as HTML5 and Javascript become more robust, but the limits of offline access and overall speed are still limitations.
Remember that just a few months ago it was revealed that iOS developers earn nearly four times more than Android devs, though the counter argument is that there are far more ad-supported free apps available to Android users which did not count towards that tally.
Check out the full release over at Ovum.
