“In this new age of mobile computing, Apple and Google’s long-term success depends largely on their ability to amass third-party developer support. Developer innovation improves the way consumers connect with others, entertain themselves, work, and more, all through apps,” Charles Newark-French reports for Flurry.. “The better a platform provider can attract unique and superior content, the more attractive the hardware device appears to consumers prior to purchase, and the more loyalty is created after purchase.”
“Last week, Apple reported it had sold a cumulative 200 million iOS devices, that over 425,000 apps are now available in the App Store and that total downloads have surpassed 15 billion. From the developer’s point of view, most attractive is that consumers who access the App Store all have credit cards on file with iTunes,” Newark-French reports. “This means 100% of them have the ability to seamlessly pay for apps and in-app purchases. All told, the App Store offers a powerful business opportunity to developers, for which it has attracted leading mobile developer support.”
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“At Flurry, we regularly track developer support across the various platforms that compete for their allegiance,” Newark-French reports. ” When companies create new projects in Flurry Analytics, they download platform-specific SDKs for their apps. Since developer resources are limited, the choices they make in building for different platforms are strong signals about their confidence in those platforms. They are literally investing their R&D budgets in the hopes of generating future revenue. In total, over 45,000 companies use Flurry Analytics across more than 90,000 applications. For this report, we compare Q1 to Q2 new project starts.”
Newark-French reports, “Studying the chart, it’s readily apparent that Android has lost developer support to iOS. Specifically, Android new project starts have dropped from 36% in Q1 to 28% in Q2. Overall, total Flurry iOS and Android new project starts grew from 9,100 in Q1 to 10,200 in Q2. Of note, this drop in Android developer support represents the second quarter-over-over slide, which follows a year of significant, steady growth for the Google-built OS. Over the course of 2010, Android developer support had climbed steadily each quarter, peaking at 39% in Q4 2010.”
Considering the events that could have precipitated this shift in developer support, Flurry has identified two probable causes:
1. iPhone Launch on Verizon: With iPhone’s arrival on Verizon in February 2011, three and half years after launching on AT&T, Apple closed the most significant vulnerability in its U.S. distribution, and likely world-wide. In fact, with its lengthy exclusive distribution agreement of iPhone on AT&T, it could be argued that Apple itself gave Android the opportunity to reach critical mass on other carriers, most notably Verizon. In that time, Google, Verizon and a host of OEMs worked hard and fast to push Android devices as an alternative to AT&T’s iPhone juggernaut. With the iPhone finally launched on Verizon, the pendulum appears to have swung back more in favor of iPhone over Android development.
2. iPad 2 Launch: Establishing an installed base of more than 20 million tablet devices in less than one year, the iPad success has been compared to taking a buzz-saw to the PC industry. Apple’s iPad shipments from its last disclosed quarter were higher than the first two quarters that the iPad was available. Apple has additionally claimed that they are seeing the “mother of all backlogs” in their efforts to build fast enough to keep up with consumer demand for the device. We believe that wholesale consumer acceptance and adoption of tablets, which just a year ago was still held in question within the industry, is further luring developers to build for iPad instead of Android.
Source: Flurry, Inc.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “JES42” for the heads up.]