Google’s Android mobile-operating system is winning over an important group of allies in its fledgling rivalry with Apple: application developers.
More than half the 2,733 developers surveyed by Appcelerator, a mobile-software tools provider, see Android as having the greatest long-term potential among operating systems. About 40 percent of respondents said Apple’s iOS would have the best long-term outlook, according to the survey released today.
The study adds to evidence that Android is gaining ground against iOS, which will power the new iPhone 4. With some 60 Android-based devices and more than 60,000 apps available, the operating system is adding more than 100,000 users daily, according to Mountain View (Calif.)-based Google. Android will eclipse iOS as the world’s second-most-popular mobile-operating system in 2012, researcher Gartner has said.
“Google and Apple are playing a chess game, and everyone else is playing catch-up,” says Scott Schwarzhoff, vice-president of marketing at Appcelerator, also in Mountain View.
It’s not just in phones that Android may challenge Apple and other smartphone software makers, including Microsoft, Research In Motion, Palm, and Symbian, the world’s most popular mobile-operating system. Dozens of manufacturers such as Sony, Logitech International, and Toshiba are readying tablet computers, netbooks, set-top boxes, e-readers, and TVs that will run on Android. “Android is the only viable alternative to Apple right now,” says Ken Dulaney, a vice-president at Gartner in San Jose.
Shades of the Microsoft-Apple PC War
Steve Dowling, a spokesman for Cupertino (Calif.)-based Apple, declined to comment.
The competition for connected electronics evokes the battle that played out between Apple and Microsoft in the 1980s and early `90s, when the personal computer operating system market was still up for grabs. “Now you get the Microsoft-Apple war in PCs on the mobile devices,” says David Owens, vice-president of marketing at Sprint Nextel, the third-largest U.S. wireless provider, which has introduced three Android-based…