Neil Hughes
The details come from Piper Jaffray's WWDC Developer Survey Summary, released Monday. Analyst Gene Munster and his team polled 45 developers at the Apple conference, where naturally they would support Apple platforms.
The survey did find that 22 of those 47 developers also write applications for Android. But all of those 22 developers said they prefer iOS monetization and ease of development over Google's Android platform.
Last year, shipments of devices running the Android mobile operating system surpassed Apple and the iPhone. While Android has seen tremendous growth, iOS users have repeatedly been found to be more likely to purchase paid applications. Android developers have expressed concern over fragmentation on the platform, and even Google has said it is "not happy" with slow application sales.
Android wasn't the only popular platform among those surveyed at WWDC. Among respondents, 36 percent indicated they create applications for BlackBerry, while 13 percent support Windows Phone 7.
A total of 36 percent of respondents develop solely for Apple's iOS. That's up from the 30 percent who said they only supported Apple in a similar survey in 2008.
Among the 45 developers polled, 51 percent said they believe iOS has the highest potential for future growth, while 40 percent said growth would come from Android. But among the 22 developers who also write for Android, two-thirds of those said Android has the highest potential for growth.
On average, developers surveyed by Piper Jaffray have 7 applications in the App Store. And 93 percent of those who write for the iPhone and iPod touch also support the iPad.
But just 7 percent of those polled at WWDC also write applications for the Mac. That's a major change from 4 years ago, when native applications didn't even exist on the iPhone platform, and WWDC was a show represented by 100 percent Mac developers.
Piper Jaffray has maintained its "overweight" rating for AAPL stock with a price target of $554. Munster believes the survey shows Apple's devoted core of developers is an important component for future success.
"We believe our survey shows that Apple's strong developer base is one of its greatest assets in mobile and differentiates iOS from the early days of the Mac, suggesting iOS is better positioned than Mac OS to maintain and grow market share," he said.
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Wesley Hilliard
Charles Martin
William Gallagher
Christine McKee
66 Comments
Way too small of a sample size to mean anything. This number represents less then 0.9% of the attendees this year and less then 0.4% of attendees in the past year. It is fairly rare to have a developer that writes for both, so somehow this survey is skewed. Maybe the developers had a co-worker that wrote for android? My impression was that the number is much smaller. I rarely found someone working on Android at the conference. I heard a lot of things like: Sometimes we write Android apps but generally iOS only. Most developers say Android owners don't buy anything, so I don't know where the growth potential comes from. Maybe the most growth for free apps.
I'm starting to wonder if Microsoft actually has the right idea in tossing out the old Windows UI.
Would it really be so crazy for Apple to do the same thing? i.e. hide the legacy OSX UI behind some power user option and present a new user with a default user experience that closer mimics an iPad than a current iMac?
It would sure help those iOS developers move across to Mac if they were running similar code and UI/UX.
The geek in me screams "no way"... but the geek part of my mind has consistently been wrong about this kind of stuff.
OK... So, according to http://www.mobiledevhq.com/developers, (the only reference I can find at short notice) there are at least 61,000 iPhone developers.
This means that Piper Jaffray's "survey" of 45 developers is a sample of around 0.074%.
As any qualified researcher will tell you, this sample is simply too small to be able to draw any meaningful conclusions about the entire body of IOS developers. To then go further and translate these small numbers into tables of percentages demonstrates heroic cretinism skills. And to then try to infer conclusions about Android or IOS market changes from this microscopic speck of data... Well that's beyond ridiculous.
This is like me stopping 45 people wearing shoes, asking them some basic questions and then claiming to have some insight into the global shoe market.
The fact that this sort of bogus, primary school spin is being hyped as 'research' by a so-called investment company suggests two things: (1) they are morons; and (2) they may have a hidden agenda...
Idiots!
"We believe our survey shows that Apple's strong developer base is one of its greatest assets in mobile and differentiates iOS from the early days of the Mac, suggesting iOS is better positioned than Mac OS to maintain and grow market share," he said.
I don't really think that their conclusion is justified by their data. For starters the data only really allows us to compare iOS to Android. The fact that iOS developers don't tend to develop for Mac isn't any indictment of the Mac, but a simple statement that mobile developers have a set of specialist skills that transfer better across to other mobile platforms than to desktop.
Second while the data is very suggestive that iOS beats Android as a developer platform, the survey was at an Apple conference. So there's an obviously bias in the sample.
Now if they get similar results at an Android developer conference I'm interested!
Would it really be so crazy for Apple to do the same thing? i.e. hide the legacy OSX UI behind some power user option and present a new user with a default user experience that closer mimics an iPad than a current iMac?
Yes it would be crazy, it would be horrible. Keyboard&mouse is a completely different input paradigm to touchscreen - retrofitting legacy software results in a horrendous experience - why do you think previous windows tablets failed so spectacularly?
Users don't want to pay 500 bucks for the worlds worst laptop, but they will happily spend it for the world's best tablet.