Google chairman, Eric Schmidt may think that developers will soon flock to Android because that platform has a bigger share of the smartphone market than iOS, but new evidence points in the opposite direction.
Schmidt told an audience at Le Web in Paris last week that ‘Ultimately, application vendors are driven by volume, and volume is favoured by the open approach Google is taking. There are so many manufacturers working to deliver Android phones globally.’
A report issued today by analytics firm, Flurry, however, shows that developers are actually moving the other way. At the beginning of 2011, Android apps accounted for around a third of the 135,000 on both platforms which use Flurry’s tools. Now, it’s just over a quarter.
‘While the market nearly doubled for both platforms, we believe key events changed the proportion of support between these two platforms,’ said Flurry. ‘Apple expanded distribution for iOS devices beyond its long-standing exclusive with AT&T to include Verizon in February and Sprint in October. Further, the highly successful launches of iPad 2 in February and iPhone 4S in October resulted increased developer support for Apple. By contrast, Android does not enjoy a truly recognizable flagship device among its army of OEMs supporting the platform.’
The Flurry report doesn’t provide hard evidence of the reasons for the shift in developer support from Android to iOS, but having studied data on in-app purchases, the company believes the answer is simple. Developers make more money from Apple’s OS. ‘Running the numbers, we find that, on average, for every $1.00 generated on iOS, the same app will generate $0.24 on Android,’ it said.
