Are Apple & iOS Conferences Dying Out?

Chris Adamson blogged this month about The Final Conf-Down, where he'd noticed that conferences for Apple developers (iPhone, iPad, Mac etc) are disappearing at an alarming rate. It's something I also noticed and tweeted about last October, and now I'm kicking myself for not blogging about it. Meanwhile Marco Arment is getting all the pageviews with his follow up, End Of The Conference Era

I think Marco missed the point. He's taken a decline in Apple & iOS specific conferences, then assumed that means all conferences in general are over.

But web development conferences are still going fine. PyCon & DjangoCon & JSConf & Laracon all seem to be doing okay, and even have regional conferences. Indie developer conferences like FemtoConf are selling out. Business Of Software is still going strong. Even niche conferences like the Xojo programming language are holding annual conferences on multiple continents. There's still plenty of conferences for digital nomads & travel bloggers & Etsy makers & songwriters & authors out there.

It's Apple-specific conferences that are disappearing. (I tweeted that last October [1] and I'm now kicking myself for not blogging about it instead.) Some of the Apple conferences pivoted to include Android and web-dev - for example, iOSDevCamp became Developer Camp and was hosted at Google premises.

Maybe this is just part of a cycle, Apple-related conferences have disappeared before (like Wolf Rentzch's C4 conference did in 2010). Or perhaps it's an early indicator that developers are moving on from Apple to other platforms.