If you judge by StackOverflow activity, barely any developers use DB2.
More developers are using Android than iOS to browse Stack Overflow
11–20 of 21 posts
Re: More developers are using Android than iOS to browse Stack Overflow
#12The 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)
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?
You're absolutely right, I should have included from StackOverflow above.
Re: More developers are using Android than iOS to browse Stack Overflow
#13While 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...
Edit: Downvoted? Why? Genuinely curious here.
Re: More developers are using Android than iOS to browse Stack Overflow
#14Interesting 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.
Re: More developers are using Android than iOS to browse Stack Overflow
#15Very dodgy methodology...
Re: More developers are using Android than iOS to browse Stack Overflow
#16Maybe its time for a poll? Anecdotally, we do Android development but not iOS.
I created one here: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3014502 It doesn't look like it's getting many upvotes.
Re: More developers are using Android than iOS to browse Stack Overflow
#17Apple 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.
Re: More developers are using Android than iOS to browse Stack Overflow
#18The 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)
Your argument might have some merit, except that you could apply it to almost anything and get non-sensical results. Django for example has close to half of the activity that Ruby on Rails does. Does that mean that Rails has severely worse documentation or APIs? Doubtful.
The more developers use a piece of technology, the more that will have questions about said technology. Poor documentation will certainly lead to more questions, but you can't look at these graphs and have any real data to support your case one way or the other.
Re: More developers are using Android than iOS to browse Stack Overflow
#19Linkbait title, please fix.
The article title itself isn't much better (but in the context of stackoverflow blogs, it is a bit more constrained).
Re: More developers are using Android than iOS to browse Stack Overflow
#20I 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!