Comments on: On the iPhone, iPad and Android Market Share

By: M. Edward (Ed) Borasky

M. Edward (Ed) Borasky — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 17:19:17 +0000

I just voted for Android, specifically the Verizon Droid Incredible. Yes, as a developer I much prefer the thought of Android. But my mobile traffic is mostly iPhone, and my site is quite technical as well.

I’ve been with Verizon for a long time, and I’ve gotten used to their coverage. If they had an iPhone when it first came out, I might have gotten one. In fact, even if they had an iPhone now, I might have gotten one. But it was time to get a smart phone, and the Incredible looked like the best Verizon had, and looks like a more comfortable phone to develop on. So that’s the way I went.

By: Eric Anderson

Eric Anderson — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 14:08:36 +0000

Notice that WebOS (Palm Pre) is missing from your stats. Maybe not any visitors to your site? Or maybe because the browser is so similar (both Webkit based) they got lumped into the iPhone stats?

By: Lawrence Oluyede

Lawrence Oluyede — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 13:24:20 +0000

To answer your last question: I think it depends on the kind of application. Obviously developing for iPhone could mean reaching a wider audience whilst developing for Android could mean more “room” for developers to write apps that do not exist yet. I never tried either of the dev kits (I’d love to though) and I am still trying to figure out which smartphone to get for myself 🙂

By: Sebastian Delmont

Sebastian Delmont — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 11:49:11 +0000

Picking a platform has nothing to do with absolute market share numbers, but rather with viability.

Viability of the platform itself, on one hand, since no-one likes to play music in the deck of the Titanic (*cough*palm*cough*).

And viability for yourself, which mostly mean whether you can get enough rewards for your efforts.

Once certain thresholds are crossed, which admittedly are very fuzzy lines, you can pick your platform based on other factors besides pure market share… such as, say, freedom of carrier choice and freedom of distribution.

By: Nicola Larosa

Nicola Larosa — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 06:50:15 +0000

The future is more important than the present, so the answer is Android, because open usually wins.

By: Daniel

Daniel — Wed, 28 Apr 2010 06:48:05 +0000

Yes, TC gave it a pretty bad spin. Ad-related traffic has very little to do with market share once you consider several factors involved. I'm not sure this is even worth writing a post about (discussion on news aggregators seems to be more than enough for me), but still I'm thankful for you posting those figures, that's interesting material. I'm particularly impressed that iPhone's share is bigger the more tech-savvy the site. I'm guessing there are two factors at play:

The share of mobile visitors (compared to non-mobile) is probably a lot smaller on the less technical websites, so it could be that the iPhone isn't really less popular, just that those visitors care less about using browsing the web through their phone.
Many of your visitors on this blog are Ruby enthusiasts, which are in big part also Apple enthusiasts. I wonder what the picture would be on a technical website with less of a bias (if that even exists).