App developers back Android tablet trend

App developers are backing the trend towards tablet PCs and are increasingly interested in creating tools that work with Android-operated slates, according to a recent poll.

The research firm IDC, in collaboration with Appcelerator, quizzed over 2,000 developers about which platforms they are “very interested” in creating applications for and Android tablets saw the biggest spike of all the latest consumer tech offerings.

IDC’s survey took place right after the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this month and appears to bode well for the various Android Honeycomb tablets that are expected to be coming onto the market in the first half of this year.

There was a good deal of interested from developers in the up-coming BlackBerry Playbook from Research In Motion as well but both the iPad, and Android tablets in general, were much more of an area of focus for respondents to the recent survey.

Tablets running on webOS are apparently well down the pecking order at present, while the iPhone and Android phones remain pretty much neck-and-neck as the two biggest priority areas for app developers in the US.

According to IDC’s figures, interest in developing apps for the iPad rose dramatically between March and June of last year, as the first really popular tablet PC was launched, while interest in developing apps for Android tablets increased by roughly 12 per cent from September 2010 to the beginning of this year.

Apple reportedly sold more than seven million iPads during the most recently assessed financial quarter and recently saw the ten billionth app downloaded from its App Store by a woman from Orpington in Kent.

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