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There are a few articles on the Internet that say so and I've personally heard it from some people around me.
If this is really so, then what would be the main cause of this?
Sources:
MOBILE iOS Developers Make More Money, But Android's Volume Is Closing The Gap
Stack Overflow conducted a survey of developers. Among the questions on that survey were compensation (by ranges) and main technologies used in the past year (with Android and iOS among the listed choices).
This is self-reported, but I don't see a reason to lie that would cause a significant bias. What could cause a bias is exposure, as participation in the survey is surely correlated with having at least heard of Stack Overflow. There are about 540k questions tagged [ios] or [iphone] and about 810k questions tagged [android] which is in the same ballpark; certainly no case can be made that one community uses Stack Overflow and the other one doesn't. I don't see a reason to suppose that e.g. better-paid iOS developers would be more likely to answering the survey than less well-paid developers in a greater proportion than Android developers.
The 2016 survey report has a section on “Top Paying Tech per Occupation” which states that
Mobile Developers who know the iOS ecosystem seem to earn about $10,000 more on average than Android Developers.
This does not match the data presented as a graph. Analysis error or editing error? Unfortunately the raw data is not present to double-check, but the 2015 survey had similar questions and the raw data is available. So I summed up the 2015 data.
Over all respondents, here's the number of respondents who mentioned Android as a technology used in the past year and the average of the midpoints of the compensation bracket that they reported (e.g. if a respondent picked “$60,000 - $80,000” then the number used in the average is 70000), and the same figures for iOS:
Tech count salary
Android 4112 30501
iOS 1957 43317
Respondents from the United States:
Android 587 63101
iOS 442 72964
Respondents from India:
Android 455 10638
iOS 140 12000
Respondents from the United Kingdom:
Android 299 45452
iOS 151 58212
Respondents from Germany:
Android 319 28589
iOS 146 36507
Respondents from Poland:
Android 130 12846
iOS 41 19512
So according to this data, yes, iOS developers do earn more than Android developers. This holds to a varying degree even at the level of individual countries (I showed the figures for the 5 most represented countries) so it isn't just a matter of iOS developers working in countries with higher salaries.
Could there be a bias in the survey? Maybe. I wrote above that I didn't think that there was a bias in the probability of responding to the survey, but there might be a bias in listing technologies. For example, it could be that more hobbyists work on Android in addition to their day job and included “Android” as one of their main, and they're less well-paid than the professionals who work on iOS for their day job. This could be due to the higher cost of becoming an iOS developer (you need a Mac and an iPhone, whereas it's possible to do Android development on any reasonably recent PC — for a US developer the cost isn't that much, but for an Indian developer it's a couple of months' salary). I don't know whether this explanation holds any water, or assuming it does how significant it is. I thought of checking whether Android developers were more prone to listing other technologies than iOS developers, but it turns out that almost all respondents who answered listed multiple technologies, and I didn't analyze this aspect further.
Base salary as an Apple IOS software engineer is $118K , vs Google Android software engineers at $97K. So Apple pays more base salary. It's unclear if that includes any fringe benefits or stock options.
