At the start of 2012, iOS is still the platform most mobile developers are interested in while enthusiasm for Android has declined. And the majority of mobile developers expect to incorporate HTM5 in their apps.

These findings come from the latest Appcelerator/IDC Mobile Developer Report in which 1869 users of the Appcelerator Titanium mobile application development platform replied to a question about which devices they were "very interested" in.

iPhone at 89% was well in advance of Android Phone at 79% and perhaps more interestingly while iPad at 88% was almost as popular as iPhone the Android Tablet at 66% lagged well behind its stablemate phone and only 51% were interested in Ice Cream Sandwich tablets. Even the fragmentation in the question is a  reminder of the problem that the multiple strands of the Android platform has caused.

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Other point of note from this chart is that Nook or Kindle Fire has sparked the interest of 28% of respondents.

Appcelerator repeats its survey at quarterly intervals, providing us, for some devices with comparative findings over 2 years, a period in which iPhone has been very consistently at the top of the chart with iPad in second place for the past year. Android on the other hand has declined over the last three quarters.

There is a distinct gap between the iOS/Android devices at the top and Windows Phone 7 and BlackBerry that come next. Over the past six months Windows 7 has seen an increase of interest, to a current 37% while both BlackBerry Phone and BlackBerry PlayBook have shown a sharp decline to 16% and 11% respectively.

(click in chart to enlarge)

The other point of interest this quarter, which comes from a follow up survey of almost 485 developers that 79% of mobile developers report that they will integrate some HTML5 in their apps in 2012. However only 6% of respondents intend to develop their entire app with HTML5 code and most developers expect to create "hybrid" applications with HTML5 accounting for 50% or less of the code.

The report comments:

We believe, and developers clearly agree, there will not be a single mobile application architecture. Instead developers must be conversant in a number of different mobile application architectures in order to produce
the most compelling applications for their use case. This quarter's survey shows that developers are clearly
expressing a preference for hybrid — an approach that can simultaneously meet multiple objectives.

More Information

Appcelerator/IDC Q1 2012 Mobile Developer Report

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