Chitika says iPhone still tops smartphone market, not Android

We’ve heard plenty of stories lately about Android overtaking iPhone/iOS as the leading smartphone platform, but Chitika thinks otherwise. Recently, comScore released a study that shows Android surpassing and being well ahead of iOS in terms of mobile platforms, but Chitika, the ad company, sees its own data contradicting comScore.

According to Chitika, the iPhone is still the top smartphone on the market by a long shot. Based on 13.5 million smartphone browser impressions, the iPhone comprised 38% whereas Android was down at %29. It’s quite a stark difference when we consider the study released by comScore where Android had 31.2% and the iPhone had only 24%.

Chitika does get to see a lot of trends and usage that most others don’t because of its position as a mobile advertising unit. However, the problem I have with the Chitika study is that it’s not a sure-fire indicator of who owns the smartphone market based on impressions from the mobile browser. Perhaps a more clear title for its study would have been, “iPhone tops mobile browser market for ad impressions.”

Of course, Chitika sort of admits this:

This, folks, is part of the joy of online statistics – everybody’s data set is a little different and has a slightly different bias.  Keep in mind that our network doesn’t take into account apps, and is purely based on a large collection of websites.  This is useful in that the data set is consistent, but assumes that web browser usage is the same among the mobile devices (in other words, all Android devices and iPhones are running Mobile Safari or Chrome Mobile 50% of the time).

iPhone users just might be using their browsers a little more than Android users. There are a number of factors to consider, but I don’t think that iOS is beating Android based on Chitika’s survey of 13 million impressions. The assumption that browser usage is the same across devices is a huge assumption to make, and drawing the conclusion that the iPhone is still the number one smartphone in the U.S. based on that limited data set is even bigger.