While the Samsung Galaxy Tablet is the Android tablet that attracts the most developer attention worldwide, in North America the Kindle Fire outstrips it.

This finding comes from the final quarterly report of trends in mobile development for 2011 from Appcelerator/IDC. The survey, conducted from November 2-3, 2011 gathered data from 2,160 of over 225,000 mobile developers who use Appcelerator’s Titanium application development platform.

Twenty-nine percent of respondents classify themselves as independent developers, with the other 71% coming from businesses; 37% live in North America, 38% in Europe, and 25% throughout the rest of the world.

In addition to the "Kindle Effect" the survey also found the greatest movement in the mobile OS rankings since Appcelerator first started tracking mobile platforms in January, 2010.

They attributed the significant changes in priorities to HP pulling the plug on Palm/webOS devices and Nokia increasingly putting its weight behind Windows Phone 7.

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While iOS continued to head the list of platforms that developers are very interested in developing for, there was a change lower down. In comparison to earlier figures,

Windows Phone 7 climbed 8 points over the previous quarter to become the clear number three mobile platform, with 38% of respondents saying they are 'very interested' in the platform, the highest ever for Microsoft.

There was also a sharp fall of for both RIM platforms. BlackBerry dropped 7 points to 21% and PlayBook QNX-based tablets dropped 6 points to 13%.

Although interest in Android was down on last quarter, over two-thirds of developers expressed strong interest in Android tablets and the survey polled interest on specific Android devices. Of 1627 responses worldwide Samsung Galaxy Tablet clearly headed the poll with 56% of developers claiming to be "very interested" compared to Amazon Kindle Fire's 43%.

However in   North America Samsung's tablet was narrowly beaten into 2nd place (48%) by Kindle Fire which attracted 49% of developers. Motorola Xoom was in the third slot both worldwide (35%) and in North America (37%). The fourth entry in the list was a different device in North America where the Barnes & Noble NOOK figured with 24%. Worldwide the HTC Flyer was in the fourth slot with 25%.

The differences between developer preferences for Android tablets in North America, Europe and Asia can be seen in this chart.

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Looking into the reasons for interest in the Kindle Fire, price and Amazon's cont library headed the list:

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Factors that concerned developers were the usual complaint of fragmentation followed by lack of features such as a camera and GPS.

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However, taken as a whole, the interest in the Kindle Fire is pretty convincing,

More Information:

Appcelerator/IDC Q4 2011 Mobile Developer Report (pdf)

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