The Android vs iPhone war has not missed the twitter battleground.
Collecting geo-location statistics from more than 250 million tweets made from mobile devices, social media data firm Gnip, together with statistical visualization firm MapBox, worked with former Google data master Eric Fischer to formulate a comprehensive heat-map for twitter usage. The activity used collective tweets data gathered since Sep 2011, and the map demonstrates global distribution and usage of the three leading smartphone OS platforms – namely android, iOS and Blackberry OS. The map uses various color codes to represent various platforms (red for tweets from iPhones, green for android tweets, purple for blackberry tweets). The US appears to be densely colored in red, with the highest concentration of iPhone tweets coming from metropolitan areas such as NYC, Chicago, LA and Dallas. These areas are however not without portions of green, showing android tweets. Google actually appears to dominate mostly on the less affluent areas, East River and Brooklyn, and Jersey City just to name a few. Blackberry tweets appear to be coming solidly from city center and the financial hubs of manhattan, where the business maestros still show loyalty to blackberry. Throughout the central and south regions of Southern America – blackberry is still the dominant smartphone. Blackberry also appears to dominate southeastern Asia and sparse regions in Africa where there is Twitter usage at all. What of China with its more than half a billion mobile phone users? China is black. Chinese government blocked twitter. Japan is red (iPhone), while most of South Korea is green. Although the twitter heat map most likely shows the picture right, it can be questioned on the basis of bias (which mobile OS users are likely to use twitter more?) Data from another source, web traffic analysis firm StatCounter, indicates in a recent report that it’s not until last month that Android overtook Apple for the global market share. (Android: 25.47%, Apple: 25.09%) It is expected that Apple is bound to release a cheaper iPhone for the less affluent mobile users probably later this year. Will this change anything as far as the global market is a playing ground?
