A report comparing the respective market share of SmartPhones by operating system, as against the market share of the mobile web and application usage during the month of April 2009 has recently been released by AdMob.
The report says, “The emergence of devices such as the iPhone and HTC Dream (G1) that deliver truly compelling Internet experiences has generated discussion of which Web consumers will use on mobile – mobile Web sites or HTML sites.”
This question is what must have encouraged AdMob to undertake this survey. The survey was based on data collected from ad requests on their own vast network of about 7,000 mobile websites and 1,600 apps, and also from details provided by Gartner.
According to the findings of this report, smartphones have a smaller market share compared to other handsets, but they still account for almost 3 times the usage compared to the usage by other handsets.
Some of the findings of the survey are listed below.
While the iPhone OS holds only 8% of the market share, it is responsible for 43% of mobile web requests and 65% of HTML use.
The Android OS has even less than 1% of the smartphone market share but it generates 3% of the mobile web requests and 9% of HTML requests.
On the other hand the Symbian OS which holds a huge chunk of the smartphone market share – 52%, carries only 36% of requests for mobile web usage and a mere 7% of HTML usage.
The survey also found that 24% of requests made from the U.S. were made using a Wi-Fi network. The iPhone, iPod Touch, Sony PSP, HTC Dream (G1) and HTC Dash are the most popularly used Wi-Fi handsets.
The study concludes that overall, mobile Web sites are used far more on smartphones than HTML sites on those phones which operate on the RIM and Symbian operating systems.
