

More developers are using Android than iOS to browse Stack Overflow - alexlmiller
http://blog.stackoverflow.com/2011/09/android-vs-ios/

======
brown9-2
_There have been endless articles written debating which platform is more
popular with developers, Android or iOS. Some have claimed that iOS is more
developer friendly, while the other side claims that Android is bound to win
and so developers should focus on that. After analyzing all our data, the
verdict is: Android is now more popular than iOS with developers._

It seems to me that previous Stackoverflow statistics posts have made similar
errors with the way they state things that they've learned based on traffic to
their site - the statement "Android is more popular than iOS with developers"
should be followed by the phrase "for visiting www.stackoverflow.com".

I'm not sure how you can extrapolate something as broad as "popular" from what
OS is used to visit their website. Popular in what way - what mobile OS they
target when building apps? What OS they like to use on their personal devices?
Etc.

~~~
hullo
While I don't disagree that Android is certainly popular and growing ever more
so, I don't think the methodology in place really justifies making comparisons
of "popularity". This is a place where the homogeneity of the iOS platform
really comes in - there's a pretty limited set of devices, which eliminates a
lot of the "how do I get Android to do X on Y handheld" questions that would
distort their numbers. The Android APIs have certainly been evolving more
rapidly in the timeframe under question than iOS, as well - there's a broad
base of previously answered questions to draw from without asking another one.

~~~
sankara
If they are using number of questions as the benchmark I would buy your
argument. It doesn't matter if pageviews is considered. Developing for Android
and searching for a solution related to android need not happen from an
android device. Most developers don't code in their handhelds.

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friggeri
The other way of looking at this data is that Android developers need more
help _[edit: on StackOverflow]_ than iOS developers. Which does not imply
anything on popularity but tell something very interesting on the quality of
the SDKs or developers… (I'm neither an Android nor iOS developer)

~~~
smackfu
Android developers need more help _from StackOverflow_ than iOS developers.
Aren't there private forums for Apple developers, that you can only see if you
are a registered developer?

~~~
friggeri
You're absolutely right, I should have included _from StackOverflow_ above.

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ajg1977
Interesting that the author of the article chose to post a link on HN, with a
substantially more linkbait title than he picked for the article itself.

The "SO has more activity around Android which proves more developers are
using Android" claim is so obviously nonsense that the whole thing just looks
like a shameless attempt to get Stackoverflow into news headlines.

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qeorge
Maybe its time for a poll?

Anecdotally, we do Android development but not iOS.

~~~
acangiano
I created one here: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3014502> It doesn't
look like it's getting many upvotes.

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jcizzle
Correlation proves causation, we've always been at war with Eurasia, and
trickle-down economics.

\- Things educated people don't believe

------
peapicker
I'm not surprised that this is true among the population of stackoverflow
users. There are many thousands of devs that have no use for, no time for, and
don't care about sites like stack overflow, though. (like me...)

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josteink
While the methodology used is somewhat lacking (as lots of others have
commented on here) I don't think the claim sounds entirely unreasonable
either.

Anyone on any platform can develop Android-apps. At least any platform with a
JVM, and that's quite a few. Only people who have invested in Mac-hardware can
create iPhone apps. That represents around 7% of the machines out there
(according to wikipedia :1). Mac- usage may be rising, but Mac is clearly the
underdog, and developers are not that different from most people. So the
statistics implies that most developers are not using Macs.

So if we accept these terms as _reasonable_ , and they remain reasonably
unchanged over time, there being more iOS developers than Android developers
would in fact be a very, very strange thing.

I'm not saying this data _proves_ anything, but I don't think it proves
anything the other way other as some commenters here have hinted (like the
Android SDK being of significantly lower quality than iOS SDK).

I can't possibly be the only one here thinking along these lines?

:1
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_system...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_systems)

Edit: Downvoted? Why? Genuinely curious here.

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smackfu
If you judge by StackOverflow activity, barely any developers use DB2.

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danmaz74
I don't think we can make an absolute comparison based on those numbers, but
the trends should be fairly significant. So it could be safe to say that the
number of iOS developers slowed its growth or even stopped, while the number
of Android devs is growing faster than before.

Just a personal note here: I just finished developing my first android app
using a cross platform solution; I could have started with ios... but I don't
have a mac!

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tabbyjabby
Very dodgy methodology...

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r00fus
Linkbait title, please fix.

The article title itself isn't much better (but in the context of
stackoverflow blogs, it is a bit more constrained).

------
nirvana
Apple has great developer forums at deforums.apple.com.

I suspect most iOS developers go there when they need help. If not, they hang
out at any of the dozens of developer forums that started back before the
AppStore was created or in the years since.

Further, iOS is a very well designed set of APIs that are very well documented
by Apple with very extensive example code.

I've asked a lot of questions about iOS, though mostly about things that are
in beta or under NDA, and I've never even considered asking on Stack Overflow.

~~~
seanMeverett
I agree. A real data analyst or mathematician or anyone collecting survey data
for that matter first must study the sample, not the output, which is what has
been done in this case. The sample here is stack overflow which is a community
of people looking to solve coding problems. There could be a few things at
work here: 1\. iOS devs hang out elsewhere 2\. There are fewer iOS devs, who
have tackled and solved the problems already 3\. iOS devs don't need a
community to solve problems

I'm not suggesting one or all of these are true, just saying these things need
to be considered before positing a position based on data. Again, the sample
defines the output in a much greater way than the data (e.g., if I survey 100
fisherman about whether they develop iOS apps, 100 will say no)

