[megaduck]

I am amazed that we've got 56 comments on this thread, and nobody's brought up market share.

Android has been beating the bejeezus out of iOS on unit sales for a while now, both in the U.S. and globally. Even more importantly, Android's growing at a faster rate.

Developers will gravitate towards the platform with the most users. Period. This has happened time and time again over the past 30 years. IBM, Microsoft, Oracle, Adobe, Google...

There's a lot of nuance underneath the headline numbers, and certain communities (like HN) will be friendlier to iOS. However, in general I would expect Android to capture the bulk of developer attention going forward.

[headhuntermdk]

Developers will gravitate to what makes them money. If it was marketshare then more developers would be writing apps for Symbian than for iOS or Android.

[megaduck]

Who says they haven't been? They certainly were in markets where Symbian was dominant. When I was in China (2008-2009), the developer support for Symbian was dramatically better than BlackBerry or iOS.

Now that Android has exploded in that market, I expect most of those developers to migrate away from Symbian to Android if they haven't already.

One thing to remember is that we're talking about the entire population of software developers. Certain demographics (like HN readers) will show up more heavily on certain platforms (like iOS). However, the general trends will always mirror marketshare.