Yowza. Guess we struck a nerve with that iOS vs. Android post…
Last week we published a report on the current state of the ‘superphone’ developer ecosystem, shining a light on the 1,400+ developers currently shipping apps for both iOS and Android (plus the Top 100 Cross-Platform Developers).
In restrospect it was pretty stupid to put this story out on the Friday before 4th of July weekend (shows how little we know about the press). But as it turns out, a lot of people thought our analysis was pretty interesting:
- Paul Boutin at VentureBeat was the first to run with the story, posting this article.
- Then, late in the day on Friday, Christina Warren at Mashable picked it up and put out this great piece.
- When John Cook at TechFlash saw the story he offered to publish it as a guest post.
- Then on Saturday we saw the story show up on Techmeme.
- By Monday Engadget had picked up the thread with this piece.
- And once the story had hit all these major outlets, we started seeing it pop up on tech and mobile-related blogs like MacTechNews.de, TUAW, even an Arabic tech blog we’d never heard of before called Unlimit-Tech.
Beyond the way the story traveled, the most interesting thing to us was the interpretation each site took with the same data. Apple-centric sites tended to see the cross-platform phenomenon as a footnote to Apple’s dominant position (heck, just 3% of iOS devs have bothered to publish on Android). While Android fans tended to view the data as further proof of that platform’s ascendance.
No matter how you read the data, our big takeaway is that lots of people share our fascination with the mobile developer ecosystem. Based on the interest in this last post, you can expect to hear from us again soon on this topic!
