A handy collection of mobile stats collected by Harry McCracken. A little too US focussed to be of much use for me personally, but still worth a look.

However, what is worth noting that, as he states, this isn't an analysis of why the numbers look like they do;

I’m collecting rather than interpreting, though I hope that some of you will draw conclusions in the comments.

The one that stands out for me (because its the most interesting from a media perspective); "Which platform gets used most on the internet?"

According to NetMarketShare, its iOS, with a 61.4% share (over 24.3% for Android.) But according to StatCounter, its Android, with a 37.2% share (over 27.1% for iOS.)

Why the discrepancy? Harry doesn't offer much;

Of course, the two organizations’ methodology may be radically different; I’m not sure, for instance, whether both, either or neither of them include the iPad in these numbers. But the disparity is a healthy reminder that it’s risky to draw conclusions from data you don’t know very much about.

True enough. But its my job to understand this stuff, so I thought I'd take a look.

StatCounter say that;

Net Apps base their stats on unique visitors per site per day. ("We 'count' unique visitors to our network sites, and only count one unique visit to each network site per day.") We base our stats on page views.

So, it would seem that NetMarketShare are reporting far more iOS devices online (based on daily site visits), while StatCounter are reporting slightly more pageviews from Android devices (indicating that the smaller number who are using Android are using them much more.)

Although it still isn't clear if that really tells the whole story. As well as different metrics, the two companies are using different data collection methods, and different ways of processing them. This is far from an in-depth analysis — neither of the data sources are ones that I use regularly or know much about their methodologies; this is still very much a top line interpretation rather than a 'proper' analysis.

But, I do know that tablet users are likely to be more active online than smartphone users, and that iOS has a far greater share of the tablet market than the phone market. Some analysis I did last year on comScore's figures indicate that in terms of traffic, despite there being far fewer devices, iPads account for more than iPhones in the UK (and iPhones account for more than Android.) So for the UK (which is the only market I'm really interested in), iOS still looks like the dominant smartphone platform.

Some Random Nerd