Android not catching on outside USA

AdMob, the world’s largest mobile advertiser, has released its monthly statistics for April 2010. The metrics show that while iPhones are still the most popular smartphone in the US, the number of Android devices is rapidly catching up. But it’s a different story outside America, where iPhone usage is still far ahead.

What’s the report?

AdMob serves ads to 23,000 mobile websites, and handled 18 billion requests during April 2010 alone. From each one of those requests, it recorded a few pertinent pieces of data – combining all of this gives a good overview of certain parts of the mobile market, including how many smartphones there are worldwide month by month. This isn’t a perfect report, because a phone has to have accessed an AdMob advertisement to register on the report – but the network is so large that it gives a very good indication.

The global disposition of Androids vs. iPhones was the main thrust of this months metrics report.

What do the figures show?

These are the highlights that we found most interesting.

iPhones are still the most popular smartphone in the world: as you might expect, but the sheer number of different Android devices available has meant that as an Operating System, Android is coming very close to iPhone OS. There are 10.7 million iPhones in the US – and Android is closing in with 8.7 million devices.

iPhones are more dominant outside the US: it may only be 2 million devices ahead in America, but outside the States  iPhone ownership outnumbers Android by about 14 million devices. There are approx. 17 million iPhones outside of America – compared to about 3 million Androids.

Android has yet to really escape America: as you can see from the above stats, roughly 75% of all Android devices in the world are in the USA and Canada. The iPhone, on the other hand, has slightly less than 50% of its total numbers in the same region. Apple has done a much better job of promoting the iPhone globally than has been done with Android.

Android is all over the Top 10: the list of the top ten most popular smartphones is packed full of Android devices – seven of them. Outside of the iPhone and two Nokias, every phone on the list is an Android.

What we think?

Android devices are slowly gaining speed, and it probably won’t be too long before they overtake iPhones. But the same problem remains – no single Android device provides real competition for Apple. In fact, outside of Motorola and HTC there are no Android device makers that have achieved significant sales (in terms of mobile advertising, of course). The Google OS may be filling out the Top 10, but the % sold of each individual device is tiny in comparison to iPhone. Device fragmentation remains as Android’s biggest problem – and with the probably launch of iPhone 4.0 in the works, Apple may be about to do something about that closing gap. I wouldn’t presume that Android has this one in the bag just yet.