iOS ups lead over Android in Web traffic, says analyst
Android may be the smartphone champ, but Apple's iOS is tops in mobile Web traffic, at least according to a report out today from analyst Gene Munster.For the second month in a row, iOS held the lead over its rival as a source of mobile traffic, meaning that more iOS devices were tracked on the Web sites examined in the report. For April, iOS captured 69 percent of all the traffic analyzed by Piper Jaffray, leaving Android in second place with 26.5 percent.Those numbers showed an increase from March when iOS accounted for 66.4 percent and Android for 28.7 percent.So if Android is the dominant smartphone platform, why does iOS surpass it in Web traffic? Munster offered three possible reasons.First, the report covered just the United States. With the iPhone winning 80 percent of all smartphone sales at AT&T and just under 60 percent at Verizon last quarter, the analyst considers iOS the most popular smartphone platform in the U.S.Second, Munster believes that iOS users are more "engaged" with their phones than are Android users on a daily basis.Third, the report encompassed both smartphones and tablets. Munster thinks that tablets yield more Web traffic than do smartphones. As such, the iPad's chunk of mobile Web traffic is greater than that of all Android tablets.The data hardly offers a full picture of overall Web traffic. The report itself looked at just 10 of the top 100 mobile Web sites, which included Answers.com, Tumblr, ChaCha, Examiner, LinkedIn, Bleacher Report, Hubpages, White Pages, Squidoo, and Dictionary.com.Still, other reports have uncovered similar results. A December report from Web analytics firm Chitika pegged iOS's share of mobile traffic at 67 percent and Android's at 33 percent.
