Flurry Analytics reports that 69 percent of app projects being started in the first quarter of 2012 are for the iOS platform and 31 percent for Android. The iOS share is up 6 percent from the same time a year ago.
Project starts for iOS apps have ranged from 63-75 percent for the last five quarters. App development does exhibit some seasonality, with the lead-up to the holiday season being the busy time of the year, especially for iOS apps. However, Android projects in Q1 2012 topped the 30 percent mark for the first time in a year.
There are a number of reasons given for this disparity: the 2-for-1 proposition where iOS apps work on both iPhones and iPads, the dominance of the iPad in the tablet market, and the fragmentation of both the hardware and software of Android devices. They note that 17 of the top 20 Android handsets have a market share of 6 percent or less.
With both Apple’s Worldwide Developers Conference and Google’s I/O conferences on the horizon, the competition for developers time and talent is at its peak. Plus app development, and therefore availability, can be a driving force in the choice by consumers of one platform over another.
Flurry is an analytics company that gathers its data from 185,000 mobile apps across 100 million unique devices. The support for each platform is measured through the downloads of platform-specific SDKs which is a leading indicator of app development.