Maaping the Android vs.ios civil war

More than 83 million users of Jumptap's mobile advertising platform have weighed in, and what appears to be a small civil war has broken out between users of smartphones running Google's Android operating system versus Apple's iOS.

According to the company, users in the South and Southwestern portions of the United States tend to "over-index" toward Android, meaning that the operating system is used and requested at a rate that's higher than the national average in a given area. Users in the Northeast and Midwest, in contrast, over-index toward iOS.

And for those curious about smartphone use in the two states that aren't attached to the 48 contiguous ones, Jumptap notes that Hawaii is an iOS-loving state and Alaska is a wash, as it over-indexes for both iOS and Android.

However, the United States isn't totally split into an Android-versus-iOS battleground. A few states—eight, in total—are putting up a fight for the Blackberry platform. Oregon, New York, and Maryland, to name a few states, all over-index for Research in Motion's primary mobile OS.

Jumptap's figures put Google's Android OS as the leading smartphone platform with 38 percent of the market to iOS and its 33 percent. Smartphones using RIM's Blackberry OS take up a distant third at 22 percent and, in total, all three platforms take up a total of 90 percent of the market – "making it increasingly difficult for competing platforms to gain traction," said Jumptap's report.

"The smartphone market remains a highly competitive and volatile one, where each percentage of market share is hard-earned," the report added.

Android might be winning the overall platform war, but it could be losing the hearts of advertisers looking to engage smartphone audiences. When compared to users of all other mobile operating systems, iOS users delivered a significantly higher percentage of advertising click-throughs. Android wasn't the worst platform, but its users reported click-throughs a bit lower than Jumptap's recorded average of 0.52 percent.

"The uniformity of the iPhone's browsing and app experiences generates higher advertising interaction. Updates of the Android and Blackberry OS platforms should strive for the same seamless experience," said Jumptap's report.

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