Red state, blue state 2012: iOS vs Android in the USA

http://www.mobify.com/blog/ios-vs-android-in-2012/

by shawnjan8 • 13 years ago

36 26 13 years ago

protomyth3• 13 years ago

That's a very odd number for North Dakota given that AT&T didn't sell the iPhone for a long time while Verizon sold Android devices.

zdw• 13 years ago

This. Carriers would distort any phone-based metrics in the US, as there are certain areas of the country where AT&T isn't available, and thus had minimal iPhone market penetration until the 4 came out on Verizon.

VLM• 13 years ago

Good observation, correction for coverage maps is a good idea. Another correction which might be relevant on a smaller-than-state scale would be distance from nearest apple iStore.

rdouble• 13 years ago

My anecdote from growing up in that area is that North Dakotans kept buying dumbphones until the iPhone was available.

protomyth3• 13 years ago

Thinking about it, that's about right except Blackberry was pretty popular since people liked it for texting.

mproud2• 13 years ago

AT&T didn’t have much for rural coverage in northern Minnesota and many parts of North Dakota, but got much better with the purchase of Cellular One (no surprise; add needed towers, get reception, get users).

However, that acquisition was a while ago. I’m sure nothing is overnight. Still, not much is truly revealed about these numbers. This article still leaves me unsatisfied.

protomyth3• 13 years ago

AT&T also ticked off a lot of people during the switch by double billing them and cutting off others. Lot of switching to Verizon and Walmart.

mason240• 13 years ago

So there is no connection between the two.

adamors• 13 years ago

Between what and what exactly?

> In this article, we’ve broken down mobile website traffic in the US according to mobile OS.

It doesn't try to find a correlation between mobile OS usage and something else.

lmickh• 13 years ago

Red and blue are connected by purple!

mobile1st• 13 years ago

perhaps validation? "the Android operating system makes up almost 75 percent of MillerCoors’ mobile traffic"

http://www.mobilemarketer.com/cms/news/content/14614.html

pavanky• 13 years ago

Split this into metro areas please. Generalizing for the entire state makes no sense.

kfcm• 13 years ago

+100.

I split my time between a large metro, a smaller metro and rural farmland. My unscientific breakdown is this.

Metro areas are serviced by multiple carriers, many of which offer both iPhones and Android smartphones. In my metro areas, I think iPhones beat Android devices by a few percentage points (10-15% maybe) as more and more Android smartphones hit the market.

Rural areas are serviced by 2-3 carriers, max. Often it's just one primary and one secondary carrier. None of these carriers--in the areas I frequent--offer the iPhone. It's safe to say Android devices are near 100% market penetration.

Were you to do a county-by-county breakdown (or metro vs rural), I think you'd see a huge difference. Were I developing an app for agriculture, iPhones wouldn't even come into consideration.

Samuel_Michon• 13 years ago

“Were you to do a county-by-county breakdown (or metro vs rural), I think you'd see a huge difference. Were I developing an app for agriculture, iPhones wouldn't even come into consideration.”

Before I saw this report, I would've thought the same. However, it's states like the Dakotas, Montana, Maine, and Vermont where there are (apparently) more iPhone users than Android users. Those states aren't exactly known for their sprawling metropolises.

mikeash• 13 years ago

I'm a little confused by "None of these carriers--in the areas I frequent--offer the iPhone." Before today, three of the four national carriers had the iPhone, with the fourth, T-Mobile, catching up today, and also being the least relevant since their rural coverage is pretty bad. Are these 2-3 carriers available in rural areas actually regional carriers, with no penetration by national carriers?

clarkm• 13 years ago

Yeah, that would provide a much clearer picture. Though I'd guess that the iOS/Android market share is highly correlated with the dominant wireless carriers in the area. Since iPhones were initially exclusive to AT&T, I'd expect areas with a high percentage of AT&T users to have the most iOS users. When smartphones were first becoming popular, users on other carriers (e.g. Verizon) didn't have the option of purchasing iPhones, so they purchased Androids.

And this distribution probably still holds today, since most users don't switch back and forth between both operating systems.

mtgx• 13 years ago

Very little correlation, zero causation.

wutbrodo• 13 years ago

What two factors are supposed to be correlated? I don't think the usage of "red state" and "blue state" is meant to imply that liberalism/conservatism is correlated with OS choice. They just co-opted a visualization commonly used for political leanings to show mobile OS choice.

taopao• 13 years ago

Yeah, right. I think that's exactly what they were implying with the article caption.

shitlord• 13 years ago

Is there a version of the graph for the colorblind? It would be nice to have one with numbers overlayed on the states.

gcb0• 13 years ago

how does the color blind decides how not to waste his vote in a national election?

i joke. i joke...

mproud2• 13 years ago

I’d love to trust these numbers, but it’s very hard to, partly as the article provided absolutely no analysis. To me, it just looks like a blatant advertisement for their services. “What does it mean? They’re both important! Spend your money with us!”

eterm• 13 years ago

Is this different to what would be expected by random sampling? The fact it goes from 70% to 70% makes me wonder if there is and underlying variation by state at all.

larsberg• 13 years ago

It would be neat to see outside the USA. When I was just out of country for some conferences, my time spent in HK and mainland China were dominated by Android phones (especially that monsterous Samsung one). Literally, I saw more Windows Phones than iPhones.

Then, I went to Tokyo, which is much more diverse, including not only Android and iPhones, but quite a few flip-style phones.

caublestone• 13 years ago

If someone wants to run this study again with some more normalization, I would be really interested in the correlation with the data and the extremity of the wealth inequality geni coefficient.

My hunch, areas that have high wealth inequality will favor one platform more than the other. Areas that have more of a gradient will be more 50/50.

cwmma• 13 years ago

so that's just the same as this xkcd strip but with median income/ios/education levels/supporting gun control/access to birth control

http://xkcd.com/1138/

Red state, blue state 2012: iOS vs Android in the USA

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