Despite its continued increase in the mainstream consciousness, Android has seen a decrease in developer interest. A new survey from Appcelerator found that 76% of mobile developers are "very interested" in creating apps for Android. 85% said they were very interested in the iPhone.
Last year at this time, both of those numbers were closer to 90%.
So interest among all platforms has deen a drop-off, but Android is showing the starkest decline, especially in comparison to its relative growth in the market.
The survey didn't provide much in the way of qualitative information to figure out why this is. In fact, one of the results of the survey found that developers see a large installed base as one of the key factors when deciding which platform to develop for - something that Android obviously has.
This survey comes just as Google announced that Google Play app downloads have exceeded 25 billion. The total number of apps in Google Play now stands at around 675,000. So it seems very odd that interest in these platforms has declined.
Maybe it's just due to the changing tide of the industry right now, and hopefully interest in development will start climbing back up.
As Phandroid's Kevin Krause points out, it’s important to note a trend common among nearly all platforms in Appcelerators Q3 survey.
"All platforms, including iOS, saw a drop off from the previous quarter except for Windows 8 Tablets. While developer interest still remains higher for Apple’s iPhone and iPad, it too has declined since the middle of 2011, though to a lesser degree than Google’s Android platform," he explained.
"As such, the figure could be easily attributed to the introduction of new platforms such as Windows Phone or to a general shift towards HTML5 over native mobile apps."
