"Developers prefer Android" is Bogus

Ok, I know I'm a huge iOS fanboy, and given the amount of time and energy I've invested in learning the platform, I have a vested interest in its success. But, I'd hope that I'd be a bit miffed at these headlines, even if the situation where reversed.

Today CNet posted the following article Survey: Developers favor Android over Apple long-term.

OK, first off, let's be accurate here. There is a 59% to 35% split in the surveyed population that says Android has the best long-term outlook. Which is very different from developer's preferring Android. I prefer Lisp to Java, but its pretty obvious that Java has had the better long-term outlook.

But what really upsets me is the science behind the survey. This was a survey of 2,363 Appcelerator Titanium developers. For those of you who don't know (and I didn't until I looked into it) Appcelerator Titanium lets you write cross-platform iOS/Android applications using HTML, JavaScript and CSS. In other words, these aren't your typical iOS developers, and will be heavily biased towards people who are interested in making cross-platformed apps.

It is not surprising, given the selection bias, that Android polled favorably. Also, overall iOS didn't do too badly. You might even say it kicked ass. Here's the iOS vs. Android rundown from the poll.



-Rich-