Android eats away at Apple's lead

Metrics from AdMob show that the dominant smartphone OS is slowly ceding ground to Google.

AdMob just released its monthly mobile metrics report. The company uses views of advertisements in the AdMob network (the biggest mobile network, stretching across all major handsets and operating systems) to gauge mobile usage trends.

Some interesting results from the report on mobile usage in February:

 

• iPhone OS increased its share of smartphone requests from 33 percent in February 2009 to 49.5% percent in February 2010.
  

Impressive, BUT the iPhone OS share decreased slightly between January 2010 and February—by 0.9%. A small loss to be sure, but it proves Apple is vulnerable to Android.

• Symbian's share of smartphone requests fell from 43 percent in February 2009 to 18 percent in February 2010.

• Android increased its share from two percent in February 2009 to 24 percent in February 2010.

No surprise here.

• The top five Android devices worldwide, by traffic, were the Motorola Droid, HTC Dream, HTC Hero, HTC Magic, and the Motorola CLIQ. The Google Nexus One only generated one percent of total Android traffic in February 2010.

Yup, the Nexus One is a flop. And two months after birth, it’s already been bested in everyway by the HTC Evo 4G.

The full report is available here.

 

(1)Share change calculated as percent of February 2010 requests less percent of January 2010 requests.

Data is usage worldwide