Are Indie App Developers Becoming An Endangered Species?

Suppose you’re an app developer who wants to ensure that your app is optimized to function well on 80% of the individual connected devices currently in use (e.g., my iPad, your Windows phone). How many different device models (e.g., Kindle Fire HD 8.9" Wi-Fi, Galaxy S III) do you think you need to support? 156.

Maybe you’re okay with having your app optimized for only 60% of active devices. That still means that you need to support 37 different devices. Even getting to 50% means supporting 18 devices, as shown below. If you’re a large or particularly thorough app developer, reaching 90% of active devices will require supporting 331 different models.

The dominance of iOS and Android platforms has obscured the proliferation of connected device models. During January, Flurry detected 2,130 different device models with active users (defined as having app sessions during January), including 500 different device models with at least 175,000 active users...