It seems to me that previous Stackoverflow statistics posts have made similar errors with the way they state things that they've learned based on traffic to their site - the statement "Android is more popular than iOS with developers" should be followed by the phrase "for visiting www.stackoverflow.com".
I'm not sure how you can extrapolate something as broad as "popular" from what OS is used to visit their website. Popular in what way - what mobile OS they target when building apps? What OS they like to use on their personal devices? Etc.
The more developers use a piece of technology, the more that will have questions about said technology. Poor documentation will certainly lead to more questions, but you can't look at these graphs and have any real data to support your case one way or the other.
This is Google we're talking about. Support is virtually non-existent.
The "SO has more activity around Android which proves more developers are using Android" claim is so obviously nonsense that the whole thing just looks like a shameless attempt to get Stackoverflow into news headlines.
Anecdotally, we do Android development but not iOS.
- Things educated people don't believe
Anyone on any platform can develop Android-apps. At least any platform with a JVM, and that's quite a few. Only people who have invested in Mac-hardware can create iPhone apps. That represents around 7% of the machines out there (according to wikipedia :1). Mac- usage may be rising, but Mac is clearly the underdog, and developers are not that different from most people. So the statistics implies that most developers are not using Macs.
So if we accept these terms as reasonable, and they remain reasonably unchanged over time, there being more iOS developers than Android developers would in fact be a very, very strange thing.
I'm not saying this data proves anything, but I don't think it proves anything the other way other as some commenters here have hinted (like the Android SDK being of significantly lower quality than iOS SDK).
I can't possibly be the only one here thinking along these lines?
:1 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_operating_system...
Edit: Downvoted? Why? Genuinely curious here.
Just a personal note here: I just finished developing my first android app using a cross platform solution; I could have started with ios... but I don't have a mac!
The article title itself isn't much better (but in the context of stackoverflow blogs, it is a bit more constrained).
I suspect most iOS developers go there when they need help. If not, they hang out at any of the dozens of developer forums that started back before the AppStore was created or in the years since.
Further, iOS is a very well designed set of APIs that are very well documented by Apple with very extensive example code.
I've asked a lot of questions about iOS, though mostly about things that are in beta or under NDA, and I've never even considered asking on Stack Overflow.
I'm not suggesting one or all of these are true, just saying these things need to be considered before positing a position based on data. Again, the sample defines the output in a much greater way than the data (e.g., if I survey 100 fisherman about whether they develop iOS apps, 100 will say no)
