Appcelerator says that it has surveyed 2,733 of its 51,000 plus developers in June about the six major smartphone OS platforms Apple (iOS), Google (Android), Palm/HP (webOS), Microsoft (Phone 7), Nokia (Symbian/Meego) and RIM (BlackBerry). Understandably everyone wants to know about tablet form factors since Apple’s iPad debut in April, but overall developers give the long-term edge to Google. Apart from Android and iOS its developers see the other platforms as having lost ground.
Funnily enough, despite there being none yet actually on the market, some 62% of developers wanted to write apps for Android based tablets.
Of course the fact that Appcelerator is a rival Qt to the core development platform on MeeGo, makes this not much of a surprise. If developers wanted to work on Symbian or MeeGo they wouldn’t use Appcelerator which has versions on the iPhone, Android, Windows and Linux. Appcelerator developers are also mostly in the US, where these two platforms rule.
But it’s worth looking at the battle between iPhone and Android, and despite the iPhone winning on every count ‘ it is thought of as the best App store; offers the best ways of discovering apps; it is thought of as the biggest, most secure store which has the best devices and the best outlook, it fails against Android on two main counts, Android has the best capabilities as an operating system and is seen as the most open platform.
Application portability is the number one developer pain across the board, with 31% citing it as their worst problem. Surely there’s an App for that.