A new study from IDC and Appcelerator reveals that developer interest in Android has been on the wane over the past year. The study involved 2,173 developers registered on Appcelerators development platform (out of a total of 280,000). A year ago the numbe rof developers saying that they were very interested in developing for Android for smartphones stood at 86%. That now stands at 78%. Those saying the same for Android for tablets was at 75% a year ago; currently that figure is at 67%.These may not seem like monumental changes in interest, however, last year the number of developers expressing serious interest in developing for Android for smartphones just 3% behind those saying the same thing was iOS for iPhone and 2% behind iOS for iPad. iOS level of developer interest has remained pretty much consistent over the year, but Android’s has dropped. Mik King, Appcelerator principal mobile strategist, summed it up:This slow erosion of Android is interesting because if you go back to the beginning of last year, Android was not quite neck-and-neck [with iOS], but pretty darn close.So what’s the cause of this decline? Well for King the reason is pretty simple: fragmentation. He has a point with that given that iOS has relatively few devices and most users will be using the latest version of the platform, and if not then the number of major versions in widespread usage will be relatively small. Compare that with Android, which has a large number of different devices with different hardware and configurations alongside multiple different platform versions all seeing major usage.Android is definitely outselling iOS, but developers will definitely have an easier time of it with iOS. How that plays out for Android in the long term remains to be seen, but these early indicators aren’t encouraging for Android or indeed its users. Not that a bit of slippage in developer interest spells the death knell for Android, but it could mean that we see fewer app ports or indeed just some apps that don’t make it to Android at all.” via mobile-review.com