February 12, 2019

Are you thinking about advertising your business on mobile devices? If so, you’re probably wondering which mobile device platform has the ability to get the most traffic to your advertisements and mobile website.

Since you’re thinking strategically, you obviously intend to get the most eyeballs on your site as possible, so picking the right platform is definitely a big part of your logistical thinking.

UI Designers Illustration

Illustration by Tran Mau Tri Tam

With that said, it’s often difficult to discover which platform is going to be best in terms of the amounts of traffic. But we’ve mined as much data as we can by looking at various reports on the search engines and have discovered some valuable information that will make it easier than ever to determine which platform is the current king of the hill.

iOS vs. Android: The Early Days

When we say “early days”, you obviously have to take it with a grain of salt since the mobile web is still basically in its infancy. But back in 2011, when things were really just heating up in the battle between these two behemoths, Apple’s iOS was clearly on top and stayed there for quite a while until about 2015.

As you can imagine, at the beginning of this heated rivalry, everybody was completely enamored with Apple products. They couldn’t wait to get the latest iPhone or iPad or even iPod for that matter, and massive amounts of people were clamoring to spend big bucks to own these much sought after devices.

Guess what? Because Apple products were so popular at the time – they still are – it was easy to determine that iOS was capable of sending more traffic than Android. Apple products sold way more than Android-based products at this time and there were a lot more people using these handheld devices to access the mobile web.

On a side note, if your business is looking to get the most bang for your buck with online business; do not neglect your uptime monitoring. That means, your website should be optimized for all platforms and perform optimally on all of them. You can achieve that by approaching your web design seriously, and if needed with the help of tools such as Pingdom, that can help out with alerting you about your website’s downtime.

iOS vs. Android: 2015-2016

At this point, we began noticing a major shift in traffic generation capabilities. In fact, Android actually overtook iOS for a time and reigned as the leading mobile traffic generating platform for a couple of years.

Android beat iOS because there was suddenly an increase in global demand for devices that were Android-based as opposed to the demand for people looking for iOS devices. During this time, it appears that iOS had reached a period of market saturation, whereas people were suddenly becoming more and more interested in Android devices.

In fact, not only did Android take over as the leader in traffic during 2015, it also took over as a leader in revenue as well. So Apple devices were obviously on a decline at this point during the battle of the mobile platforms, but Android wasn’t capable of holding onto its lead forever.

iOS vs. Android: The Present

The most recent data shows that iOS has made a major comeback. In fact, the two platforms are basically neck and neck at this point, although iOS is the clear leader in countries like Australia, Japan, the US, France and the UK. Android, on the other hand, leads in traffic in Brazil, India, Italy, Germany, and Spain. This is an interesting battle that will continue to play out throughout the years.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, it’s best to advertise on every platform in the beginning. See which one generates the most leads (and even more important sales) and stick with that platform and move on from the rest.

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