Developers’ Interest Growing in Windows Phone, Waning in BlackBerry

Mobile developers are very interested in Amazon’s new Kindle Fire, intrigued by Windows Phone and disenchanted with the BlackBerry.

Those are some of the takeaways from the latest in a series of surveys from Appcelerator and IDC.

Interest in the Kindle Fire has been high in a number of recent surveys of both developers and potential buyers, all of whom seem to be attracted by the device’s low price as well as the fact that Amazon has its own App Store. Appcelerator says interest in the Kindle Fire nearly matches that shown in the iPad prior to its launch.

On the operating system side, Apple has solidifed its lead while Android has slipped a bit but remains the clear No. 2 in developer interest. The interesting shift has been for the No. 3 spot, where Windows Phone has been gaining to pass Research In Motion, which is seeing waning interest from developers for both the operating system powering today’s BlackBerry devices as well as the QNX software that runs inside the PlayBook tablet.

Interest in developing for BlackBerry OS phones fell seven points, to 21 percent, with interest in QNX-based tablets falling six points to 13 percent.

Interest in Microsoft’s mobile operating system appears to be strengthened as Nokia readies its first Windows Phone products, with half of developers interested in the OS citing the Nokia partnership as a key reason. Overall, about 38 percent of mobile developers said they were very interested in Windows Phone, an increase of eight percentage points and a record high for Microsoft.

“The third major mobile OS after iOS and Android is now clearly Windows, driven largely by the Microsoft / Nokia partnership and underscored by the new Nokia Lumia 800,” IDC analyst Scott Ellison said in a statement. “Amazon has shown exceptional early success in appealing to developers with the Kindle Fire, showing that price and differentiation are keys to competing in the crowded Android tablet space, rather than simply chasing the iPad market.”

Two-thirds of developers are interested in developing HTML5 apps, the same number as in the prior study.