Mobile OS: iPhone and Android most popular, particularly in the US

Mobile advertising network AdMob recently published some interesting statistics on handset and operating system use in its Mobile Metrics Report of February 2010. It's no surprise that Android and the iPhone OS are still gaining popularity, nor that the market for mobile advertising is growing. Perhaps the most surprising thing the study showed, then, was the unprecedented success of the Motorola Milestone.


The market for mobile advertising is in good shape thanks to growing ownership of smartphones, other mobiles, and mobile Internet devices such as the iPod Touch and Wi-Fi-enabled portable games consoles. Although business plummeted during last autumn's credit crunch, things now picking up, and business has more than doubled within the space of a year. In fact, advertising traffic provided by AdMob in Western Europe is estimated to have tripled between February 2009 and February 2010.

The UK is AdMob's third largest market in terms of advertising traffic, with the company reportedly sending nearly 597 million ads to UK mobiles in just one month. However, given that AdMob is based in California, it's no surprise that the US is the firm's biggest market for mobile advertising. In fact, over half of the ads supplied by AdMob were destined for American-owned handsets. Interestingly, the company is also currently in the process of being bought by Google

The market is being strongly driven by application-based advertising, with iPhone and Android apps leading the way. This explains why the iPod Touch accounts for a huge 93% of ad traffic outside of the mobile phone category, as not only does its close resemblance to the iPhone make it a choice device for mobile browsing, but it also offers users access to applications in the App Store.

On the whole though, the Apple mobile operating system is losing some of its market share, mainly to Google. The AdMob report showed the iPhone OS share of ad requests dropped from 54% in November to 50% in February, whereas Android's ad requests rose from 16% to 24%. Figures for other OS remained fairly stable, with a slight drop in requests from both Symbian (18%) and RIM (4%).

Apple has managed to pull off a double whammy in terms of products. The iPhone is the number one platform for mobile advertising, just ahead of the iPod Touch, which comes in at number two. The next most popular device is the Motorola Milestone (Motorola Droid in the US), the first smartphone to feature Android 2. It was released at the end of last year and is already proving more popular than all other devices running on Android 1. It'll certainly be interesting to see how the HTC Legend and Desire get on in the next report. It'd also be interesting to see how these results compare with those of a study carried out by a company totally independent from Google ...

Around the world

Some interesting regional differences came to light in the report, even between Western countries. US users seem to favour Android, for example, with the Google OS accounting for 42% of traffic and still growing since its launch. In fact, it could overtake the Apple operating system in the US as soon as this month. In the UK, on the other hand, Android only accounts for 11% of the market. Plus, the top Android smartphone in the UK is the HTC Hero, with 4.4% of the market share.

However, it's still early days for the Motorola Milestone in the UK, and things could well go the same way as the US where the handset accounts for over 15% of traffic. In fact, this model has been a phenomenal success in the US and is to almost certainly responsible for some of Android's growth in popularity.



In Indonesia and India the market couldn't be more different, with Nokia and its Symbian operating system clearly leading the way with 90% of the market share.

Obviously, in the absence of a full and entirely neutral study, we can only take these figures at face value. This is a snapshot of the market as seen by a company selling consumer advertising, and it isn't necessarily representative of the entire global smartphone market. AdMob itself recognises that this data is heavily influenced by applications, leading to an over-representation of the iPhone OS and Android due to their respective application stores. Notably, the market share of Windows Mobile seems grossly underestimated at just 2% of the global market share.

Let's compare this data with hits on own website. Obviously, hits on our website are no more representative of all web traffic as AdMob is of all advertising, but in March 2010, the iPhone OS was used for around 1.5% of hits on our parent site. Android was used for 10% more visits than the previous month with just under 0.2% of hits.

It looks like Google's Android has got its work cut out for it, in Europe at least!


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