Are iPhone app developers ignoring the vast majority of mobile customers?

November 2, 2009 · Leave a Comment

Brands that focus on the iPhone are ignoring the vast majority of customers that use other phones. That’s the message from mobile analytics firm Bango and it’s clearly underscored by the latest statistics.

Bango counts unique handsets that access all mobile sites that use Bango’s popular analytics tools to identify and track mobile visitors and process payments. For February 2009, the iPhone does not even make the Top 20. mobiThinking spotted this previously, but this is the first time that Bango has gone public with its message.

Given the hype about the iPhone and the surprising number of companies that have released Apple-only sites and applications recently, you’d be forgiven for thinking that Bango has gone a bit mad, but it is talking sense. Nor is Bango alone in pointing out this anomaly. The vast majority of your customers don’t use iPhones and won’t. iPhones are great, but they only account for a small percentage of smartphones and smartphones only account for a small percentage of handsets.

But weren’t Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch the top handsets in February 2009, according to AdMob Mobile Metrics Report? We hear you ask…

They were, but if you read AdMob’s report correctly, it doesn’t and never claimed to count unique users. AdMob counts the number of mobile adverts its advertising network serves to different types of phones, not unique handsets; so if iPhone users surf more (aren’t the majority of iPhone users on unlimited data plans?), then iPhones go to the top.

See Bango’s stats side-by-side with AdMob’s below.

But aren’t Bango and AdMob just measuring visitors to their customers’ sites?

That’s true, the view of both is restricted to their customers’ sites, which are concentrated in the US and European markets (both core markets for the iPhone), but they are recognized leaders in their fields, with large customer bases, so have a better perspective than most. More on this here.

So who backs up Bango’s view?

First up, there are the global sales figures for new smartphones for last year, released by Gartner:

Smartphones account for 11-12 percent of all mobile handsets sold globally.

iPhones account for 8.2 percent of the smartphones sold globally.

Towards the end of the year, smartphone growth had slowed to 3.7 percent.

So the iPhone was less than 1 percent of new phones last year – note this ignores all those people who didn’t change their phone last year. Would any marketers cast their net so needlessly thin in any other channel? See the hard figures below.