Two recently released reports point out a contradiction in the mobile development industry. On the one hand, a Gartner report shows that users overwhelming favor the Android platform, which now accounts for more than 50 percent of smartphone sales. On the other hand, an Appcelerator developer survey finds that developers are more interested in Apple’s iOS platform. Specifically, 90 percent of developers are interested in iOS, which accounts for 15 percent of sales, while 85 percent of developers are interested in Android, which accounts for 50 percent of sales. In addition, 33 percent of developers are interested in Windows Phone, which only has 1.7 percent of sales.
Why aren’t developers chasing the money? Matthew Baxter-Reynolds says that developers have believed that if they create a lot of apps for a platform, users will flock to that platform. In other words, “If we build it, the users will come.” In reality, however, users aren’t being won over to the platform with the most apps. Baxter-Reynolds argues, “As developers we’ve got to shift out of this position of assuming we’re important in all this. We need to be watching the market and understanding where the customers are taking us.”
