When it comes to the mobile Web, increasingly there are only two mobile platforms which matter: Apple and Android. According to AdMob’s October, 2009 mobile metrics report, the iPhone/iPod Touch and Android phones accounted for 75 percent of mobile Web traffic in the U.S., as measured by all the mobile ad requests it tracks. That number is up from a combined 65 percent in September, 2009.
The iPhone is miles ahead of everyone else, but Android is quickly rising as a strong second. While Android phones managed to increase their share from 17 percent in September, 2009 to 20 percent in October, 2009, the iPhone and iPod Touch gained even more, going from 48 percent to 55 percent share. Meanwhile, during that same month the Blackberry ’s mobile Web traffic share went down from 14 percent to 12 percent, and Palm’s webOS shrank from 10 percent to 5 percent (Ouch).
On a global basis, the iPhone OS now accounts for 50 percent of all mobile traffic, up from 43 percent the month before. Android has an 11 percent global share, which makes it third globally after Nokia/Symbian’s 25 percent share. The U.S. makes up 49 percent of all the mobile Web traffic, according to AdMob’s stats. Thus strength in the U.S. translates to strength in the worldwide numbers.
As major new carriers come onboard, the numbers can shift dramatically. Since Verizon launched the Droid two weeks ago, that single device now makes up 24 percent of all Android mobile Web traffic. The HTC Dream, which is the oldest Android device, is the only one with more, at 36 percent of Android traffic. I wouldn’t be surprised if the Droid passes that within the next two weeks.
AdMob was recently acquired by Google for $750 million. Hopefully, it will continue to share this mobile market share data in the future.
Show me a snapdragon based mobile device running Android and I’m sold.
You’re looking for the HTC Dragon, or Passion as it’s being called on Verizon. Possible launch in Dec/Jan?
Also, the Sony Ericsson Xperia X10a and the Acer Liquid/A1 will both have snapdragon processors (though Acer’s will be underclocked). Check out all android phones at:
http://www.androphones.com/all-android-phones.php
Passion is what I want, I would gladly pay full price for it right now if it were available.
This report is very natural.. obviously, Droid OS’s is one of the fastest if not the fastest mobile OS available. This just prove that the Droid Launch last 2 weeks was really a success despite of the “slow-start” comment by tech-critiques
Collation of info about droid release last week: http://bit.ly/did-droid-conquered-USA-today
Hope Droid will serve as a hand of midas to Verizon Corp. Soweet
75% is quite a bit. It does seem as if android has just exploded lately. And obviously Apple was already big with smart phone web traffic. It just seems like more phone companies are going with android. But I do not blame them.
Well, there’s another way to access the web from my non-smart phone, which apparently AdMob hasn’t captured. I access the web over SMS using the service provided by http://www.smsaway.com. But currently they have only one application, hopefully, they’ll add more soon. If this takes off, then the majority of the population that carry non-smart phones will be benefited.
This report is based off of October metrics. This report doesn’t count the increase from the Driod phone which released on Verizon in early November. I’d be curious to see the difference between this report and the next months.
i hope the ipod touch wasnt included in the figures
It may not be a phone, but it is certainly a mobile device.
Why would you want to exclude it? Because it can’t make voice calls? You can be sure that the iPod Touch is included (because it says iPhone OS).
By my understanding there is absolutely no way to disentangle the iPhone/iPod Touch data, even if you wanted to. They have the same user-agent string.
No, the agent strings are different:
- iPod Touch:
* Mozila/5.0 (iPod; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420.1 (KHTML, like Geckto) Version/3.0 Mobile/3A101a Safari/419.3
- iPhone:
* Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU like Mac OS X; en) AppleWebKit/420+ (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/3.0 Mobile/1C28 Safari/419.3
It appears that the new players (Palm, Apple, Google) are displacing the old (RIMM, Nokia, Microsoft). But we don’t have a head to head matchup yet, due to the lookin to the telco networks.
Am I the only one surprised by the how out of sight Windows Mobile OS is, or is this just an artifact of me not paying enough attention?
Either way, that’s got to be a problem for the Redmond crowd.
You’re not paying attention. WinMo is effectively dead right now. MS is either going to pull out a miracle save with WinMo 7 or put the last nail in the coffin.
Any idea why this differs so wildly from the stats on StatCounter:
http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-ww-monthly-200910-200910-bar
…where iPhone remains significantly behind Symbian? Could it be that AdMob sell fewer ads to Symbian apps?
I would treat any mobile usage stats with extreme scepticism… they vary so much.
Two reasons :
- Less apps available on Symbian, thus less AdMob ads, though those people are browsing the web.
- Much less Symbian devices in the US (which was the scope of AdMob report) than in the rest of the world (read : europe)
This is going in the BS direction, unfortunately. You count *ad* traffic and then conclude that there is no difference to normal traffic?
Quote: “and Android phones accounted for 75 percent of mobile Web traffic in the U.S., as measured by all the mobile ad requests it tracks.”
And from that traffic by ad requests you go to conclude quote: “iPhone OS now accounts for 50 percent of all mobile traffic,”
This is plain wrong IMHO.
Wow at Android. No wonder the messageboards and Apple sites like thinksecret have been in panic mode over Android.
With so much marketshare growth it is isn’t surprising that developers are dumping Apple’s iPhone to ramp up Android development.
Should be lots of cheap ex-iPhone developer Mac Mini’s for sale over the next year…
You might want to reread this one. Mobile OSX gained more share than Android. And if Apple gets another carrier in the next few months, I don’t imagine they’ll have any trouble maintaining their dominance in the U.S.
http://www.thinksecret.com was disbanded awhile ago. I think you made this up.
Not sure why Android is listed as Google.
Android is Open Handset Alliance. Just looking over the member companies:
http://www.openhandsetalliance.com/oha_members.html
not a shock we are seeing a flood of Android based phones.
Interesting, no Verizon on that list?
Does anyone know how this accounts for multiple browsers on Windows Mobile? I know WM is still really low on the chart but personally I use 3-4 browsers on my WinMo phone and I know for sure they don’t all register as Windows Mobile browsers. I think webOS and Apple both only have 1 option for browsers. I am not sure about Android RIM.
Browsers don’t matter. My user agent string in Firefox still lists me as Windows NT 5.1. That’s what’s being measured here.
In other words, yes, WinMo really is that far behind.
It will be interesting to see where the landscape is one year from now. The Android OS is a game changer.
Why do you put Android in the 75% without saying what percentage each has? Android has practically nothing.
Don’t believe it. Especially the Worldwide figure. Nokia is still by far number 1 outside f the US and sales figures would tell us this too.
These figures have been messed with if you ask me.
It’s tracking web traffic, not handset ownership. The two are not the same.
Only 30% of handsets in the US use the mobile internet. It is much lower in other countries.
Even worse. It’s not measuring handset ownership, but it’s not measuring web traffic either. It’s the amount of ads this (mainly US-oriented) adfirm serves.
The worldwide figure is BS. It’s more likely US + (Western) Europe.
Problem is that a lot of us using windows mobile are using customized devices that do not register as window mobile with the modified mobile browsers available.
It’s not the browser being counted here. It’s the OS. Are you saying your modified WinMo is reporting itself as iPhone or Android? Why would it do that?
Does anyone remember Helio? They were all about the hot new Korean Phones focused on higher quality cell phone games and good web browsing. Apple really destroyed their business heh.
Comparing Web traffic for smartphones is like comparing gas usage for cars. It gives you an idea, but it’s likely a false idea. If all Ford’s consume more gas than all Toyota’s, does it mean anything? Not really. One big reason for the small share of RIM phones’ web traffic is that RIM’s data is much more compressed and optimized than the data going to Iphoned or Androids. RIM’s BES does much of the heavy lifting in data compression. Nothing like that for the others.
It’s not counting BANDWIDTH, it’s counting HITS.
The reason for the low HITS is that web browsing with a trackball on tiny BlackBerry screens is a sucky experience, so as a group, BB owners don’t surf much. Full-face touchscreens are the ideal interface for web browsing.
Hey, I love Admob but it’s time Techcrunch and others come clean on this. Admob’s data source is both mobile web and in-app advertising traffic. Due to their focus over the past 18 months on in-app advertising on iPhone and Android, the data is wildly skewed toward these phones. Ask for independent data from top mobile websites, such as Facebook, Yahoo, or Weather Channel.
Need to agree here that the info is very biased, this is a very Admob centric point of view which will heavily skew to iphone and anything with apps
has anyone try using android?! IT SUCKS. the keyboard sucks, the function is in NO comparison to iphone.
iPhone > blackberry > all the other functional phones > android
This is also a vivid illustration of why AT&T coverage leaves so much to be desired. That one company handles 60 percent of the nation’s data traffic, while the other three handle just 40 percent among them.
There’s no way that Verizon isn’t going to have the same sorts of data problems if the Droids become a monster hit and RIM develops an OS that makes it easy for people to actually use connectivity for anything but plain-text email.
“Lies, damned lies, and statistics” immediately comes to my mind…
I read the report. It’s almost worthless.
“AdMob also serves mobile ads into iPhone and Android applications. The traffic from these applications is included in the Metrics report.”
– They count ads served to applications on those 2 devices, and no others. AdMob only serves ads to those two, so that really skews the numbers.
“AdMob classifies a phone as a smartphone when it has an identifiable operating system… Despite running the iPhone OS, the iPod touch is not a phone, and thus not considered a smartphone based on this definition.”
– They state that they don’t consider the iPod Touch a smartphone, yet they take the number of requests generated by the iPod Touch & add it to their totals. Wouldn’t that be like saying: “Last month, Honda sold more automobiles than any other automobile manufacturer in the world,” and you include the sales of Honda motorcycles, lawnmowers, and outboard motors in your data, and then you post a disclaimer saying: “Despite having engines made by Honda, motorcycles and lawn mowers and outboard motors are not cars, and thus not considered automobiles.”
AdMob serves junk data.
Agreed. Nothing can be nailed down with these stats. I’m sure the leaders of the race are the same, but the true numbers are much different. There are a lot of windows mobile users out there.
Interesting comment, toby (iboy).
1. android’s keyboard sucks? android is an OS, available on multiple devices. It has no keyboard. Certain handsets do, but not all. Do you mean Driod? Droid is not all of android.
2. neither does eyephone have a keyboard. But no keyboard is better, I guess.
iboy rant on…
“There’s no way that Verizon isn’t going to have the same sorts of data problems”
Except that VZW’s 3G is already 5 times AT&Tingular’s.
This what happens when leading blog sites twist information and create misleading headlines to grab traffic !
- this is “mobile ad traffic,” which is what AdMob tracks-
- this is NOT “total mobile web traffic,” which includes downloading apps, browsing, and consuming media over the browser
- this is NOT mobile device market share or mobile device installed base
Your headline and story is so misleading, and frankly, I’m disappointed by you guys at TechCrunch.
I thought you were better than this!
It pains me that outlets like TechCrunch report AdMob’s numbers as true market representation. I applaud AdMob for giving us these snapshots each month but PLEASE remember that these stats are based on traffic running through AdMob’s ad network, which has a large proportion of iPhone app developers. This may become more representative of the smartphone market but we cannot say that these numbers represent the overall mobile web browsing numbers.
Couldn’t agree more… These are only traffic through AdMob network!
Yeah, they should really being pointing this out in the summary.
Completely biased to the data that admob collects. There are very few apps that use admob for the webOS or blackberry, which totally skews the numbers.
Anyone else realize that since Google has purchased Admob, half of Google’s advertising through apps will come from Apple?!
Moreover, 75%-80% of Google’s income from Admob will come from operating systems that compete with Google’s own Android!
Genius business plan!
Correction: 80%-89% of Google’s income from Admob will come from operating systems that compete with Google’s own Android!
Google’s the real winner here.
This is the world according to AdMob which is not exactly an unbiased view. It’s skewed heavily to who they sell to. Take this with more than a grain of salt. I don’t believe the Android numbers at all because their install base is still tiny compared to Windows Mobile, RIM, and Symbian.
I think web browsing is a better indicator of marketshare. Not everyone will install third party apps that happen to run admob ads, but almost everyone browses the web with their mobile.
According to Clicky, iPhone + Android accounts for about 60% of total US mobile traffic. Blackberry is around 30%.
http://getclicky.com/marketshare/us/operating-systems/mobile/
And the droid has about a 3.5% total marketshare of US mobile traffic, which is about 1/3 of the total Android traffic.
http://getclicky.com/marketshare/us/droid/
NOTE: Even though the title of this article is correct, they body of the article is incorrectly making statements such as “On a global basis, the iPhone OS now accounts for 50 percent of all mobile traffic”. This is incorrect. The numbers are only for the universe of Smartphones – not ALL phones or ALL mobile traffic.
See note at bottom of chart “Note: The above share % refers only to requests from Smartphones” .
Our lives would be MUCH easier if these stats were true! Almost as helpful as when the majority of web browsers started supporting the TABLE tag back in 1995/6. ;0)