Developers Slowly Losing Interest in Android

adweek reporting:
The fragmented Android universe may be causing app developers to think twice about bothering with the increasingly popular mobile platform, according to a new report.
Though Android smartphones and tablets are outselling Apple’s iOS devices, a new survey conducted by mobile platform company Appcelerator and research firm International Data Corporation (IDC) suggests that developers are gradually losing interest in the Android platform because the landscape is just too complicated.

According to a quarterly survey of Appcelerator developers around the world, interest in Android phones fell 4.7 percentage points to 78.6 percent quarter-over-quarter, and interest in Android tablets dropped 2.2 percentage points to 65.9 percent during the same time period. The researchers said the declines are close to or within the margins of error, but have been consistent over the past three quarters.

“What this tells us is that the fragmentation Android is experiencing at both the smartphone and tablet levels is really turning some developers off  the platform,” said Mike King, mobile strategist for Appcelerator. “Unless Google begins to curtail that fragmentation, we think that they’re going to continue to lose interest of the developers.”
The erosion of interest in Google’s mobile platform could also be due to monetization models, he continued. While iOS developers can only sell their apps through Apple’s app store, Android developers can take several paths to monetization.
“That’s more difficult, confusing and expensive,” King said.
While the survey suggests that Google may have some work to do when it comes to fragmentation issues, said King, it also revealed that the tech giant is making some unexpected strides in impressing developers interested in social mobile applications, particularly when compared to social media titan Facebook.
When asked which company they thought was better positioned to support them in developing social mobile applications, 39 percent said Google’s networked properties were more important to them than the scale of Facebook’s social network.
The expectation, King said, was that given its volume of subscribers and credibility as a social network, Facebook would significantly outshine Google.
Instead, he said, they found that “Google’s punching way, way above its weight.”
When asked why developers backed the different platforms, those that supported Facebook pointed to its scale (not surprisingly), and those that indicated a preference for Google cited its many networked properties (including Google+, Google Maps, search, Gmail, etc.) and its developer outreach and engagement.