Research from app analytics firm Flurry found that developer support for Android decreased during the second quarter of 2011, with developers switching their attentions to Apple’s iOS for both the iPhone and the iPad. In a blog post, the company’s Charles Newark-French said that “the choices developers make in building for different platforms strongly signal their confidence in those platforms.” Support for Android in new products fell to 28 percent in the second quarter from 36 percent in the first. This marked the second sequential quarter of decline: Android peaked with 39 percent of new projects at the end of 2010, following steady growth during the year.

Flurry suggested two possible reasons for the shift: the launch of the iPhone with Verizon Wireless, noting that while AT&T’s long exclusive on the device gave a chance for Android to thrive with this operator, “the pendulum appears to have swung back in favour of iPhone over Android development;” and the launch of the iPad 2, which has driven app development for the tablet (Apple recently said that 100,000 titles have been created targeting this device).

According to the post, as the Android user base continues to grow, “ongoing work to improve the Android Market layout and to push forward the adoption of Google Checkout are critical to its success.” This week the company announced a number of updates to Android Market, including tools to aid product discovery. Flurry also noted that “the development community is concerned about the rising cost of deploying across the Android installed base, due to the double whammy of OS and storefront fragmentation.” It was suggested that “Google must tack aggressively at this stage of the race to ensure that Apple doesn’t continue to take its developer-support wind.”