I get asked this question a lot by mobile and technology agencies who are presenting to me mainly about iphone apps. Many of them see an iPhone app like a dinner party blog (where your CEO hears about blogging at a dinner party and says "we need a blog!") and I can understand where they're coming from. I have sat in countless briefings where agencies have got the whole idea together and we've been running through how we are going to implement a campaign and then they utter those dreaded words in the closing seconds...

"oh and lets do an iphone app"


However the argument against doing it isn't "what are you trying to achieve by building an iphone app?" but more "why build for the iphone when it only holds around 18.7% of the market?" and then without fail we'll get a load of stats that back up their argument about how many people are using various other phones etc etc. We get the same argument from agencies that are doing web builds with the same excuse, so therefore it's not worth missing out on the flash just for such a small percentage of the market.

All of these are valid, however being a bit of data geek I like to play devil's advocate with the stats they've been given to reel off in their sell.




Wait what? the iPhone accounts for only 18.7% of the smartphone market? (Forbes Magazine today)


This is a great statement that will hopefully make many people think they haven't really been looking at the bigger picture especially when you take into account my figures from above (iPhone at best is 9.35% of the entire mobile market). However what this statistic doesn't tell you is how much people on the other 81.7% use their phones to access the internet.

My argument looking at the data I have access to is not a lot. Of all mobile traffic, Apple make up a whopping 98%!! This applies to flash based sites that can't be displayed on Apple devices either. Android based devices are making an increase in internet usage but rather than seeing them gaining share over Apple we're seeing them picking up traffic over other mobiles.

It gets worse when you look at engagement scores: People on Apple devices tend to spend twice as much time and access twice as much content than Android/RIM/Windows phone users. You could read the first part of that as Apple devices are slow, but about 90% of them are browsing on wi-fi rather than a 3G network.

We should build something in for all those other people that don't have an Apple device!


Yes true we should, however start to consider the reality of this. The iphone has 4 models throw in the iPad (2 Versions) the iPod Touch (4 versions) and a few variations of iOS based around the same thing, so basically about 10 models of phone which besides a few bits of added functionality behave in the same way. Now lets look at the mobile market in general, how many variations of phone do Nokia have? How many models use Android? How many different screen sizes and specifications are we looking at?

In conclusion Apple make make up a small percentage of the overall market, but in terms of people actually using their mobiles to browse the internet it's definitely worthwhile.