According to an IDC survey reported on by Joe Wilcox of Betanews, Apple's iPhone and iPad dominate app developers' priorities: 91 percent and 88 percent of app developers, respectively, are "very interested" in writing apps for them.
Android smartphones and tablets weren't very far behind, however, at 87 percent and 74 percent, respectively. The former isn't too surprising: The Android Market is packed with hundreds of thousands of smartphone apps already, and app developers like Spacetime Studios are already making more money on Android than iOS.
The latter is pretty surprising, though, since there are so few Android tablet apps. As of July 1, David Pogue of the New York Times only found a couple of hundred Android apps specifically designed for tablets, and he had to dig to find an exact number since Google wasn't forthcoming.
So why, according to app developers, aren't there more Android tablet apps?
The platform isn't mature yet
As IDC noted, "developers aren't sure what to make of the Android tablet picture", because "the changing OS, hardware, and form factor requirements ... remain fluid to this day." The programming code to the "Honeycomb" tablet version of Android hasn't even been released yet, as Android's code usually is, which suggests that Google is too embarrassed to let others see its mistakes.
Furthermore, when asked "Which factors do you think are most important for Android tablets to succeed?" the largest number of app developers, 52 percent, chose "User Experience Improvements." It's clear that they want to write apps for Android tablets, but feel that the tablets themselves have a ways to go to catch up to the iPad.
It's hard to bring phone apps to tablets
Most Android phone apps will technically run on Android tablets. But the ones that I tried on a Xoom in the store had comically shrunken controls and text boxes. Where original iPhone apps are just doubled in size to bring them up to the iPad's scale, using some Android phone apps on an Android tablet is more like viewing the mobile version of a website on your laptop, and it breaks the user experience.
Furthermore, bringing an Android phone app to tablets doesn't just mean scaling things to fit the large screen. It also means learning new concepts like the Fragments API, which puts a sidebar menu on the tablet screen. Honeycomb works very differently from Gingerbread and Froyo, the smartphone versions of Android, and each tablet works a bit differently too -- fragmentation was cited as app developers' third-biggest concern about Android tablets.
Coming soon?
The upcoming Ice Cream Sandwich will unify both smartphone and tablet versions of Android, and hopefully give developers an easier entry point to start writing apps. If it solves the user experience, phone-to-tablet portability, and fragmentation problems, it just might cause an explosion of Android tablet apps.
What isn't likely to help? Better hardware: It came in dead last at 29 percent, even among technically-minded app developers. Apparently, it doesn't matter whether a tablet is dual-core or not so long as it is a joy to use.
Jared Spurbeck is an open-source software enthusiast, who uses an Android phone and an Ubuntu laptop PC. He has been writing about technology and electronics since 2008.
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