Analytics firm Flurry reported Thursday that new project starts for iPhone and iPad apps are outpacing new project starts for Android by a wide margin, and that for the second quarter in a row, Android projects starts have lost share to iOS apps, despite the growing number of Android devices on the market. The company said that the launch of the iPad 2 and Apple’s deal to bring the iPhone to Verizon were the two “probable causes.”
Flurry’s data is a subset of all iOS and Android app development, as it comes from developers who use the company’s platform-specific SDKs to add Flurry analytics tracking to their apps. That said, the company claims a total of 45,000 developers who have embedded Flurry’s tools in some 90,000 apps, a significant sample from both.
The firm’s report said that for the second in a row, new project starts for both platforms grew in the June quarter from 9,100 apps to 10,200. iPhone apps grew from representing 54% to 57% of those new project starts, while iPad apps grew from 10% to 15%. Android new project starts shrank from 36% to 28% during the quarter.
You can see that data expressed as pie charts in the figure below.
Flurry believes that Apple’s deal with Verizon and the launch of the iPad 2 were behind the decreasing momentum for Android.
In particular, the company said that, “We believe that wholesale consumer acceptance and adoption of tablets, which just a year ago was questionable within the industry, is further luring developers to build for iPad instead of Android.”
Flurry also said that developers are concerned about the rising cost of deploying their apps for the Android market due to the fragmentation of Android app download services and payment solutions.
“With developers pinched on both sides of the revenue and cost equation,” the company said, “Google must tack aggressively at this stage of the race to ensure that Apple doesn’t continue to take its developer-support wind.