In Defense of BlackBerry…
Over the past several years, the public mobile metrics reports by AdMob (a mobile advertising network that is in the process of being acquired by Google) have been instrumental in proving the relevance of the mobile web. AdMob’s March 2010 Mobile Metrics[1] report illustrates the rise of Android OS[2], a mobile operating system open sourced by their soon to be parent company, Google. According to the report, mobile web usage of the Android OS now eclipses usage of iPhone OS in the US. While we cannot confirm this, the rise of Android OS can be supported by our own data and by the mere fact that in the first 4 months of 2010 alone, 20 new Android OS Experience Phones[3] entered the market worldwide.
PercentMobile sees US mobile Web usage very differently from Admob.
In the March 2010 AdMob Report, they state that the BlackBerry RIM OS[4] has a mobile web usage share in the US of a mere 4%. This is in a country where RIM leads in total smartphone subscribers[5], has a long standing history in the corporate world, and where its president was almost inseparable from his BlackBerry during the election media blitz. At PercentMobile, our numbers state that RIM OS represents 22% of US mobile web usage, composed of Verizon customers with a 44% share and Sprint PCS, T-Mobile and ATT with shares from 18% to 14%.
How Can This Be Explained?
There are multiple factors that can influence the numbers like the entropy of site demographics used for the analysis.
One of the most outstanding factors is that BlackBerry Internet traffic is routed through RIM’s proxy servers in Canada. AdMob mistakenly identifies this mobile web traffic as originating in Canada rather than the US. This contributes to a significant undercount of RIM OS share estimates in the US market.
Another example of the same type of misidentification occurred when we recently tried to log into Facebook from a new T-Mobile BlackBerry Bold and got a security warning that we were logging in from an unknown location and therefore could not be granted access. The next morning, we got a message from Facebook stating that somebody from Canada had tried to log into the account while we were in NYC.
In order to identify the source of a RIM OS request, a mere lookup of IP address of the request is insufficient. It is necessary to look beyond the RIM proxy in order to determine the true source network operator.
At PercentMobile, our mobile-specific business rules are designed to present you with the actual source networks of your visitors rather than the locations of service proxies such as RIM, Novarra, and Opera.
Our Findings
We come to the conclusion that iPhone OS leads mobile web usage in the USA with 48% followed by RIM OS with 22% and Android OS around 5%. We feel that it is imperative that analytics reports are as accurate as possible, and question why AdMob has not corrected their underexposure of RIM OS in the US - a terrific operating system with a large user base and significant share of the mobile Web ecosystem.
References
- http://metrics.admob.com/2010/04/march-2010-mobile-metrics-report/
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Android_operating_system
- http://analytics.percentmobile.com/public/the_rise_of_the_experience_phone
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Research_In_Motion
- http://metrics.admob.com/2010/04/45-million-us-smartphone-users-comscore/
