While the iPhone is already great as it is, most of us agree that what really makes it stand out are the apps. Apps are masterpieces of design, engineering and ingenuity. Creating great apps is very demanding and challenging for developers. Having numerous great apps on the App Store is essential to the success of the App Store and the iPhone. So essential are apps that Google and Microsoft go to great lengths to lure iOS developers to work on their platform. So far they've had varying degrees of success.
To look into the matter, AppStoreHQ put together a comprehensive report, including the simple diagram featured above showing how many developers are present on each platform. As you can see, Apple iOS is still the leader, but Android boasts a lot of developers as well. The overlap on the other hand, is surprisingly small. How can that be explained? Going from one platform to the other is still particularly challenging for developers. Unfortunately for Google, the Android market still isn't interesting enough financially for developers to justify the effort, even subsidized.
[via Mashable]
