AdMob: The Original iPhone is Dead, Android Becoming Increasingly Diversified
Here at MobileCrunch, we love numbers. We especially love numbers that make good stories. And we more especially love numbers that make good stories about phones. And so we love it when AdMob packages together data …
Context & Ripple Effects
AdMob has been turning its network data into a de facto handset census since it reached profitability and raised $15.7 million in October 2008, and its latest monthly report is the sharpest signal yet of a generational handoff: the original iPhone's share of ad traffic has effectively gone to zero, while Android — per the TechCrunch pickup — has passed the iPhone in US web traffic.
The second finding matters as much as the first: Android is no longer one hero device but an increasingly diversified fleet of models, meaning AdMob's measurements are shifting from tracking two platforms to mapping a fragmented ecosystem. That makes its numbers more valuable to advertisers precisely as they become harder to summarize.
First-order effects
- Developers and advertisers using AdMob now have data-backed license to stop optimizing for the original iPhone, whose traffic contribution is functionally nil, and to weight US campaigns toward Android devices.
- AdMob's own positioning strengthens: with Android volume overtaking the iPhone on its network, it becomes the go-to scoreboard for the platform race at exactly the moment buyers need one.
Second-order effects
- Rival networks face pressure to match AdMob's device-level reporting, since fragmentation means advertisers will increasingly pay whoever can target and measure across dozens of Android models rather than one or two iPhones.
- Handset makers shipping diversified Android lineups gain a measurable advertising story against Apple's single-device narrative, sharpening the platform competition for developer attention.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, ad-network telemetry becomes the industry's accepted proxy for mobile market share — a structural shift that gives intermediaries like AdMob outsized influence over how platforms are perceived and priced.
- Android's fragmentation-versus-iOS-control tradeoff hardens into the central strategic question for mobile advertising, forcing tooling and measurement standards built for many devices rather than few.
The trend: Mobile platform power is being measured and contested through ad-network traffic data, with Android's diversification eroding the single-device clarity that defined the early iPhone era.