As Apple prepares for a full week in which it will fete and educate the developers who write apps for the iPhone and iPad (and also its Mac computers) at its annual Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC) in San Francisco – and with Google preparing to do the same for those writing Android apps at its I/O event on 27 June – the question many are asking is: if Android phones outsell iPhones, why do developers still prefer to write for Apple first?
It wasn’t expected to be this way. Speaking at the LeWeb conference on 7 December 2011, Google’s executive chairman Eric Schmidt was in ebullient form as he considered the success of Google’s Android mobile operating system. “Android is ahead of the iPhone now,” he told the audience of techies and entrepreneurs. Ahead in terms of the number of phones, the quality of the software, the lower price, and having more companies making devices that used it, he said.