Advertising and data analysis firm Millennial Media issued its monthly mobile trends report this morning for October. It showed that the iPhone was the most used single device for the month with nearly 13% of all use across its network. While Android might dominate the ecosystem, the iPhone as a singular device is the most used smartphone on the market.
Apple also dominated the shares for original equipment manufacturers, taking 23.5% of impressions across the network. Apple beat out HTC (18.1%) and Samsung (17.24%). Android claimed 14 of the top 20 devices in impression share with the Motorola Droid X coming in the No. 2 spot behind the iPhone. It goes to show what we have known for a while: Android wins by the numbers but Apple’s smartphone is the most desired.
In terms of overall impressions by mobile platform, Android wins by a landslide with 56% of the pie in Millennial’s network. iOS comes in second with 28%, half of what Android does. Cut that in half again and you get Research In Motion’s BlackBerry. This validates another trend we have known for a bit: Android has completely stolen RIM’s market, now outperforming it in the ad department by a factor of four to one.
With the prevalence of Apple and Android smartphones gobbling up impression share, it is no wonder that the top input method was touch, with 69%. QWERTY plus touch, QWERTY by itself and just the a standard keyboard input rounded out the rankings with 11% and 10% rankings.
The most used apps were music and entertainment related with games, communications and social networking the next three. News has broken the top five types of apps by impressions, rising from the No. 9 spot in October 2010. Productivity tools, like Evernote, calculators or document apps rose to No. 6 in the new rankings coming back from an unranked position a year ago.
According to Millennial’s numbers, the top goals for developers in 2012 is to continue developing new applications (40%) with maximizing revenue (21%) the next highest goal. See the chart below.
It is important to understand where Millennial is coming from with these monthly reports. The company is fundamentally an advertising network that acquires a lot of data on how people interact with apps in its network. These numbers are not entirely indicative of the true balance of power in the mobile ecosystem but are a good glimpse into content consumption based on freemium apps and mobile Web pages. The iPhone has done well in this category from the beginning either through quality apps or by the fact that advertisers push towards the iPhone because of its perceived superiority of the iPhone user to pay attention and interact with media and ads.