A Bird's-Eye View Of iOS And Android As Seen By One Premium Ad Platform
Comparing the iOS and Android platforms is often tricky because the perspective is usually one-sided. But mobile ad platforms tend to have a pretty well-rounded look at the state of things because they're agnostic …
Context & Ripple Effects
The iOS-versus-Android argument has been running almost entirely on partisan fuel — the confirmed 'war of words' between the two fan camps has dominated discussion since late 2010, and even measured datapoints land in a fight. AdMob's April 2010 finding that the original iPhone was dead and Android was diversifying was read through exactly that lens.
A premium ad platform publishing its own comparative view matters because ad networks see both platforms' traffic side by side: they sit downstream of the developer decisions mapped in December's iOS and Android app economies analysis and upstream of the advertiser budgets those decisions chase. With AdMob already reporting Android's diversification back in 2010 and Quantcast crediting Android with 25% of US mobile web browsing by August, an agnostic read on where impressions actually flow is the closest thing the debate has to a referee.
First-order effects
- Advertisers and developers weighing iOS against Android get a single cross-platform benchmark instead of dueling vendor numbers, directly informing where ad spend and development effort go next.
Second-order effects
- Platform advocates on both sides now have to argue against a source with no handset stake, raising the evidentiary bar for the fan-war talking points that have defined the debate.
Third-order effects
- If ad networks keep supplying the most credible cross-platform data, they consolidate into the de facto measurement layer for smartphone platform share — the role web-analytics firms played in the browser wars.
The trend: Mobile ad networks are emerging as the neutral measurement layer of the platform wars, their impression data increasingly settling arguments that device vendors and fans cannot.