In its latest Mobile Metrics Report for April, AdMob indicates that while Android devices are showing stronger sales growth than iPhone, when combined with iPod Touches, devices running the iPhone OS still outnumber Android 2 to 1 in the U.S.
In the US, there were 10.7 million iPhone devices compared to 8.7 million Android devices. If you include the iPod touch, that number soars to 18.3 million. Internationally, however, the iPhone platform has significantly more unique devices than Android in the AdMob network. The ratio of iPhone OS devices to Android devices was 3.5 to 1. The report breaks out the geographic distribution of the devices in more detail; 75% of Android devices are in North America, compared to 49% of iPhone OS devices.
Despite these figures, the report notes that it’s difficult to determine the number of active devices in various markets because devices shipped can be very different from the installed user base on a platform. For example, Apple does not break out how many of the 85 million iPhone OS units are no longer in use, what the overlap is between iPhone and iPod touch users, or the geographic distribution of the devices.
Still, it’s interesting that AdMob — which is now fully part of Google — is reporting on the high number of iPhones in the wild compared to Android. In previous reports, Android dominates the headlines.
