In an effort to drum up support for its smartphone platform among existing smartphone developers, Microsoft has released a raft of information to help iOS developers find their feet on Windows Phone 7. The information includes a guide to help iOS developers translate from iOS APIs to Windows Phone ones, a development guide specifically for iOS developers, and first-hand accounts on porting iPhone applications to Windows Phones.
One of the undisputed high points of Windows Phone is its developer experience. Together, Visual Studio, Expression Blend, Silverlight, and XNA provide a high quality toolchain and development environment—one that has seen Microsoft's faltering smartphone platform punch well above its weight when it comes to application support, boasting now of more than 15,000 applications. Later in the year, the Mango update will greatly expand the reach and capabilities of the SDK, enabling the development of a wide range of applications that can't yet be built.
However, it's Apple that currently has the biggest application store and most developer interest, and hence the most mobile developers with significant touch computing experience. Microsoft is keen to tap into that expertise, and making its platform as approachable as possible (given the radical differences in technology) is one way of doing that. The company also indicated that similar guides may be produced for developers on other platforms. Android has a thriving developer community, so it would be another obvious target. The large body of Symbian developers is also worthy of consideration, especially as Microsoft and Nokia both are already hoping that they will make the leap to Windows Phone.
So far, the company's efforts to court developers are seeing mixed success. Appcelerator's quarterly developer survey shows that iPhone and Android phones still have the clear lead, with 91 percent of developers "very interested" in developing for iPhone, and 85 percent for Android phones. Windows Phone is the "best of the rest," with Microsoft's platform edging ahead of RIM's BlackBerry, but it's a long way behind, with just 29 percent of developers giving the "very interested" response. This represents a 7 point drop compared to the previous quarter. The only reason that Microsoft took third place is that interest in BlackBerry phones dropped further still, by 11 points to 27 percent.
Appcelerator developers an HTML-and-JavaScript toolkit, Appcelerator Titanium, for developing phone and desktop applications. The survey respondents were all users of the phone oriented Titanium Mobile. This version currently targets iOS and Android, so Appcelerator users naturally have a bias towards those platforms. In spite of that bias, the survey still gives an indication of just what existing, experienced mobile developers feel about the different platform options available to them.
The main reasons cited for this lack of interest were that the platform is so far behind iOS and Android that it wouldn't catch up and that developers are already so busy with iOS and Android that they can't support another platform. Lesser reasons were concerns that the operating system is still emerging and that it doesn't offer much scope for making money—both attributable to its small market share.