Android’s fragmentation and Microsoft’s and RIM’s battle for relevance

A recent survey of 2,760 mobile application developers using Appcelerator’s cross-platform development environment reveals challenges for Google around fragmentation and for Research in Motion, Microsoft, and Hewlett-Packard around access to developer time and mind share.

Not surprisingly, Apple iOS and Google Android phones and tablets occupy the top four spots in terms of interest in developing for a specific platform. There’s more than a 40 percent gap between the two leaders and everyone else, including RIM’s BlackBerry, Microsoft’s Windows Phone, and HP’s WebOS mobile platforms. The survey was conducted April 11-13 by research firm IDC on behalf of Appcelerator.

Android’s challenges with fragmentation

The survey gets interesting when developers cite their concerns with Android. Fragmentation — the variations in Android devices themselves, the multiple OS versions in the market, and the multiple user interace overlays deployed — is overwhelmingly the top issue.

At the bottom of developers’ Android concerns are feature/function comparisons versus Apple’s iOS (the very comparisons that the hardware makers, ironically, try to push) and the ability to make more money from Apple’s ecosystem.

The survey also points out that developers are very interested in developing for Android tablets but not for the actual Android tablets on the market:

On the software side, 71 percent respondents are “very interested” in the Android OS, but on the hardware side, only 52 percent are very interested in developing applications for the Samsung Galaxy Tab. This drops to 44 percent for Motorola Xoom, the first Android tablet with Android’s [tablet-specific] “Honeycomb” 3.0 OS.

This unenthusiastic view of the Android tablets is surprising, considering their relatively strong hardware specifications, especially compared to the likes of Apple’s iPad 2, that the current Android tablets offer. However, fragmentation may be a root cause of the lack of interest, as developers may not want to test and support the various Android tablet offerings. You can see why Google is working hard to reduce fragmentation, even if it allows outsiders to call Google’s open source credentials into question.

RIM and Microsoft’s uphill battle for relevance

As much work as Google has cut out for it, it’s nothing compared to what the other three mobile platform vendors — Microsoft, RIM, and HP — face: When asked if any other platform can catch up to Apple or Google, 62 percent of respondents said no.

Digging deeper into their answers, it’s clear the respondents are more interested in the Microsoft and Nokia partnership over Windows Phone 7 versus what RIM and HP are planning for their mobile platforms. Respondents said the Nokia partnership could position Microsoft as a more serious competitor to Apple and Google. However, even within this group, when asked what poses the biggest risk to the success of Microsoft’s mobile platform, 46 percent cited “not enough time.” The only higher-ranking risk was a perception that Google and Apple are just too far ahead.

What’s more troubling is that Appcelerator helps developers build native, cross-device mobile applications from a single code base for iOS, Android, and BlackBerry. Yet these developers can’t find the time to target anything other than iOS and Android, even with a tool that addresses multiple platforms from a single code base.

These developers are saying the marginal cost of tailoring the single code base application for the RIM platform is outweighed by the value of delivering the next feature for iOS and Android users of their application. Ostensibly, if Appcelerator supported Windows Phone 7 and WebOS, the developers would likewise be as disinclined to tailor the single code base for them.

Given that Appcelerator developers are using a platform designed to support mobile heterogeneity (it essentially converts HTML, AJAX, PHP, and Ruby code into native code), it’s very telling that even these cross-platform developers are in fact focused on just two platforms: iOS and Android.

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This article, “Android’s fragmentation and Microsoft’s and RIM’s battle for relevance,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Savio Rodrigues’s Open Sources blog and follow the latest developments in open source at InfoWorld.com. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.