The Android and iPhone camps might be forever locked in a philosophical smartphone war, but it turns out that each users on both sides of the battle are more alike than they are different. So says new data gathered by eMarketer from comScore and Compete. Turns out, iPhone and Android users are nearly identical in their smartphone usage patterns, save for mobile email habits.
Nearly all smartphone users from either side of the iPhone-Android divide indicated that their used their handset to consume mobile media – 94% of Apple’s iPhone user and 92% of Android users. Getting news through the mobile web browser is just as important to an iPhone user (80%) as it is to an Android user (80%). When it comes to mobile app usage, 83% of iPhone users and 82% of Android users embraced apps. Social networking was used by 58% of iPhoners and 52% of Androiders. The similarity continues for instant messaging usage – 43% of iPhone users, 46% of Android users.
The stand-out difference, though, was in email usage. While 87% of iPhone users used their handset to check their emails, only 63% of Android users did the same. That’s interesting, because the average email usage proportion is 70% of all smartphone users. The iPhone side uses mobile email much more than the average, but the Android platform falls short of that average by a lot. Even with Gmail integration, it seems that Android users just don’t do much emailing.
Perhaps the gap in Android’s email usage patterns have something to do with the separate Gmail and other email inboxes. As far as explanations are concerned, that all we got.
[Via: Mashable]