iOS developer survey: 47% are on Android too, only 7% on Mac

Perhaps not surprisingly, because they were all at an Apple conference, 100% prefer iOS

Click to enlarge. Source: Piper Jaffray

Piper Jaffray's Gene Munster attended Apple's (AAPL) Worldwide Developers Conference last week and spent some time buttonholing attendees for a follow-up survey he was conducting.

He published the results Monday in a note to clients that compared the responses of the 45 developers he spoke to last week to 20 he surveyed at the same event three years earlier.

The comparison is less useful than it might have been because in June 2008 there was no Google (GOOG) Android, no iPad, no App Store, and the iPhone SDK (Software Developers Kit) was still in beta.

And as Munster points out, his sample consisted only of WWDC attendees who are iOS developers, so they would naturally be expected to favor Apple's development platforms.

Still, despite all the caveats, there were some interesting findings. Of the 45 developers he spoke to...

• Only 7% are also developing apps for the Mac, down from 50% in 2008.
• Nearly half (47%) write apps for Android, 36% for Research in Motion's (RIMM) BlackBerry, 13% for Microsoft (MSFT) Windows Phone 7 and 7% for Hewlett-Packard's (HPQ) WebOS.
• Asked which platform had the highest potential for future growth, none mentioned the BlackBerry, WebOS or Nokia's (NOK) Symbian.
• Although 100% preferred iOS for ease of development and monetization, they did have some complaints, chief among them Apple's "strict limitations" (38%) and the App Store approval process (11%).