Geogad hosts two local Silicon Valley meetup called the Informal Android Developer Meetup and the Informal iPhone Developer Meetup. New mobile developers at these meetings often ask which mobile platforms are worth their time to learn. Sometimes it’s a matter of money and the perception of which app stores have the best sales. Other times, it depends on a developer’s previous programming background.

TheFierceDeveloper newsletter actually addressed this question with more substantial info provided by a marketing report from VisionMobile. The most interesting part of the report to me was the estimates of the length of time required to learn a new mobile platform. To quite FierceDeveloper quoting VisionMobile,

…according to the report, coders require 15 months or more to figure out Symbian, compared to an average of 7.5 months across rival platforms. Android is considered the easiest platform to learn, with 22 percent of respondents claiming they absorbed its intricacies in under a month.

It is nice to see that some of the platform are relatively easy for new programmers to pick up. It should make for an exciting experience for mobile apps.

Tags: Android, mobile, Symbian

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 8th, 2010 at 2:08 pm and is filed under Open Source, Web Site Development. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.