According to the latest numbers from Nielsen, the growth patterns of the mobile operating ecosystem have stabilized in the last several months. Android, which enjoyed wild growth to become the market leader in 2010, has topped out with a consistent 36% of the mobile OS market share while Apple’s iOS hovers around 26% and Blackberry has stopped its bleeding around 23%.
Android users are also the most data hungry of smartphone users. Nielsen’s shows data between February and April 2011 including data and application usage. The average Android user consumes 582 megabytes of data per month, against 492 MBs for iOS Users.
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Nielsen says that 79% of iOS users and 74% of Android users have downloaded applications within the last month, both far outstripping the usage patterns of the Hewlett-Packard WebOS and Windows Phone 7. BlackBerry users do not use a lot of data (127 MBs) per month and only 42% have downloaded apps within the last month. Check the data usage chart below.
After application downloads, the next most popular activity on smartphones is streaming online music or radio. That bodes well for services like Pandora, MOG and Rdio and validates the move of Amazon, Google and possibly Apple into the music streaming arena.
The surprise bit of data is that Windows Mobile is still a strong presence in the market at 9%, with Windows Phone 7 claiming 1% of the market. That has to sting for Microsoft as users are more likely to jump ship to iOS or Android and simply hold onto their old CE phones longer than upgrade to WP7. Expect that number to get significant bump when Nokia and Microsoft unleash the first iterations of their partnership later this year and Windows Mobile customers’ two-year contracts run out and it is time for a new phone.
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