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.
“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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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!”
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.