Developer Interest in webOS on the Rise?
Appcelerator is a cross-platform app development firm that helps web developers make mobile and desktop applications. On a quarterly basis, they survey developers on their perceptions of various trends in mobile computing. For their September 2010 (Q4) survey, the headlining act was Android’s rise to dominance as a development platform. Still, we were able to mine some positive data regarding our beloved webOS: webOS saw a “whopping” 3% uptick in developer interest (see graph above) compared with the previous quarterly poll in June. Now… we realize this is small potatoes, and could be due to a variety of reasons — not least of which could be polling margin of error. Still, we’d like to think this may be due in part to full PDK implementation and the continued Hot Apps Program. Regardless, any positive trend for webOS is a good thing in this highly competitive market, and we hope this is just the beginning.
It wasn’t all roses, though: developer interest for a webOS tablet was quite tepid, tying the Blackberry’s Blackpad for 16% of developer interest. Even though these devices only exist in theory at the moment, Appcelerator remarked that this was much less than would be expected. There’s no question that if HP wants to push a webOS tablet into the limelight, they’re going to have to push very, very hard. Here’s hoping they do.
UPDATE: And now that Blackberry has released an impressive demo for their Playbook tablet, we anticipate developer interest will increase significantly. It’s high time for HP to really put the pedal to the metal, here.
[Source: Appcelerator]
