Android Fragmentation Contributing to Platform's 'Slow Erosion'

Android fragmentation has been a hot topic of late, and a new study suggests that the problem has prompted developers to shy away from the platform.

According to IDC and Appcelerator, HTML5 will "move to center stage" in 2012.

"This approach will help developers innovate across a crowded mobile landscape that has seen iOS, Android, and Windows 7 claim the top 3 spots, while RIM and others have experienced significant declines," according to the report.

That change won't happen overnight, however. Android remains a "solid number two" behind Apple's iOS, the study found. But 79 percent of mobile developers said they will integrate HTML5 into their apps this year, which IDC and Appcelerator said was much higher than industry watchers predicted.

During this quarter, interest in Android phone app development has dropped 4.7 percent to 78.6 percent, the study found.

"Although close to or within the margins of error, these drops are consistent with the trend of small but steady erosion in Android interest over the last four quarters, even as enormous growth in Android unit shipments continues," the firms concluded.

Apple remains at number one for app development, with 89 percent of developers expressing an interest in the iPhone and 88 percent interested in the iPad.

Coming in at number three was Windows Phone 7, where "interest remains high" despite sluggish sales.

What will these new apps include? The study said that location and notifications are the top two services that developers want to add to their apps in 2012.

Developers are still struggling with how best to integrate social into their apps, meanwhile. While Facebook integration might seem like a no-brainer for social apps, the Google network tends to have a bigger payoff. About 39 percent of developers said that Google's broad range of assets - like Google search, YouTube, Gmail, Google Maps - are more valuable than Facebook's social graph.

"This translates into a big competitive opportunity for Google—and potential significant risk for Facebook—especially because developers perceive Google as innovating faster than Facebook," Scott Ellison, vice president of Mobile & Connected Consumer Platforms at IDC, said in a statement. "Add to that, Google itself is clearly gearing up to leverage its network effects, one example being the alteration of its privacy policies to allow sharing of user data across its services."

Earlier this month, game developer Mika Mobile said it would no longer support Android since the platform was not lucrative enough to justify the development and support costs it requires.

Google executive chairman Eric Schmidt raised eyebrows when he appeared at the Consumer Electronics Show in January and argued that Android is not fragmented but "differentiated." For more, see Hey, Google: Here's What Fragmentation Means.

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