iPad – iOS + (HTML5 + Safari) x Facebook =

Developer opportunity!

Hmm .. someone should check my Algebra. Moving on.

In light of Android’s sales figures outpacing the iPhone (ZDNet), it’s no surprise that “iPhone Developers start to work on Android” (Mobile Dev Pro Online). Advanced skills may be necessary to put your apps on the map.

It’s not the first time developers have looked at other platforms. In the past few years, they chased iPhone projects to ride the consumer wave. Prior to that, they moved enterprises to the Windows platform (see “How to store and access (a lot) of protected content” for my thoughts). Developers have gone from moving the enterprise market to chasing the consumer .. with that kind of motivation and a decent universe of reasonably-priced devices, an Android option could really move the needle.

Other motivators? Well, Facebook, Planning an iPad App, Looks to Work around Apple. Their 700 million users (aka, consumers) could establish a significant beachhead on the iPad device. Rather than coding in iOS (Apple’s mobile operating system), Facebook is encouraging developers to write HTML5 code that will run in the Safari browser .. a nifty way to get dynamic code onto the device. When you leverage HTML5 and the Facebook platform, you have a ‘runs-on-PC and runs-on-Apple’ code line for the target market.

The target market? In a word: Huge.

Note that the lack of Flash support on earlier iPad devices may have impacted sales .. without Flash, the iPad could not run FarmVille (or my favorite, Mafia Wars). In the news: iTunes now offers a version of FarmVille by Zygna (the release date was June 2011) for the iOS devices. Somebody got wise.

In the realm of “follow the money”, HTML5-plus-Safari may pilfer sales and the margin Apple collects from the AppStore.

In the realm of breaking chokeholds, leveraging the popularity of the device and combining it with the reach of Facebook gives game and application developers a whole new playground in which to play.