Could you imagine if people could make the kind of money developing things for Linux that they do developing things for iOS? It would make comments like yours kind of funny and relevant.
Yeah, one has to admit that Mac users are a more receptive audience for the high-brow humor of sophisticated fart apps.
Also, we're hiring: http://aws.amazon.com/sdejobs/
Yes, the whole world "uses Linux" in one way or another. But Linux is not a viable consumer platform (No, Android doesn't count).
https://www.neflix.com https://www.amazon.com
And we're not the only people making consumer-oriented Linux software. For example, https://gmail.com .
As an aggregate measure, spread across several million people? Perhaps. Resolving that is just a matter of looking up the data.
But that's not the question that matters for an actual developer. What actually matters is: How much money are you making on one platform, and how much could you make on the other? That question has a lot more to do with whether or not a developer makes his or her rent next month than the aggregate measure above.
I'm not saying it's useless to look at the long-term picture. I'm just trying to show that it's a big mistake to focus on that to the exclusion of more pressing things first.
Now it's true that this isn't quite apples to apples since Linux is more fungible than iOS in most regards, mostly thanks to it's open source nature. For example moving your web application from Linux to FreeBSD is likely to make less of a revenue difference than say moving from iOS to Windows Phone 8.
The biggest point is probably that the existence of an Open Source/Free operating system has probably enabled more profitable businesses to exist than iOS.
Maybe.
On the one hand, I know exactly how great it is to have development tools that are a free download away (I remember shelling out hundreds on a C++ compiler in the mid-90s). Open source definitely rocks in this respect.
On the other hand, I know that without the iPhone, iOS, and all of the associated things that came with it (including the industry's massive pivot to compete in its wake), things might look very different for an app developer today. (Or at the very least they'd be slower in getting to this point.) I think it's important to realize that there were no independent app developers in 2007 - writing, buying and using software for the Palm handhelds or Windows CE was radically different on nearly every level.
I would still wager that more paid developer hours go towards stuff that ends up being executed on top of Linux than iOS though.
You're not writing a PHP application for Linux, you're just writing a PHP application, which can run on one of Linux, Windows, OSX, etc. Just because you choose to run in on Linux does not mean you wrote it specifically to be run on Linux, nor should it be included in the metric for Linux apps.
Rarely.
As I said before, you're not developing for Linux when you make a web application. You're developing for Rails/PHP/whathaveyou. These are all OS-agnostic and can be run on any OS. I can run my PHP app on my Macbook, my Linux server, or my friend's Windows desktop. They all work. Because it's not meant to be built for a particular OS.
I don't understand how you can be this stubborn about it. If the language can be run on any number of platforms, then, by definition, it's not an application for one specific platform.
I don't think it's invalid to describe a web app deployed to Linux or an embedded system running Linux as a "Linux app" but I guess that is really semantics.
Unless of course you're talking about building a single Linux virtual machine image and deploying it to thousands of servers. That actually works phenomenally. Doesn't work as well with Apple's software. Or Microsoft's for that matter (though this is largely a question of licensing cost.)
Without a doubt. IBM, Google, Amazon, and many, many others are deep in the Linux eco-system. Pretty much all supercomputing is done on Linux, and all the boring cloud/infrastructure/scientific stuff is done on Linux.
I realize this might not be what you're saying, so I'll slay a misinterpretation for those that might hold it: going only by the sheer number of users on a platform alone does not mean that it is going to be a good idea for you to develop for it.
Most notable point is that iOS users spend more than 3x on apps than android users. Also, the same exact app on the iTunes Store tends to make more then 3x in sales than the same app on Google Play.