After a quick start, the Android-powered Google-phone has begun to fall behind the iPhone in a critical measure of smartphone success: the presence on the World Wide Web metric.

According to a report by Net Applications, page requests by the iPhone operating system continue to rise while requests from the Android operating system have flattened out. Net Applications measures page requests by operating system among their clients and not the number of phones in operation, but that is an accurate representation of the actual usage by owners of smartphones.

The new report, issued Monday by Net Applications of Aliso Viejo, CA, says, “Android and the iPhone’s browsing usage share upon launch were nearly identical for the first few months. However, May numbers show that the Android mobile platform has fallen off the pace the iPhone set upon its launch.”

For the first five months after the launch of the Android phones, the Google-led operating system kept pace with the number of requests made by the Apple iPhone OS, according to a Fortune story. In the sixth month, however, iPhone requests continued to grow at a rapid rate, while Android requests fell off the pace. This measurement seems to show that Android had a relatively high number of early adopters but that sales of Google-powered phones are not being sustained.

The Net Applications data would seem to echo similar data provided by AdMob, which specifically measures advertising requests coming in from the Web. The Admob data has consistently shown that requests from the Apple operating system have outpaced requests from any other smartphone sources, RIM and Android included. Although the smartphone market is relatively young, the iPhone appears to be the smartphone that is actually being used by its purchasers, regardless of purchase stats.

The experience of T-Mobile with Android may be a harbinger of tepid long-term success for the Palm Pre, due for launch this week. Certainly, the initial buzz around this new entry into the smartphone race is likely to give it strong initial sales. But as the Android and the Blackberry Storm have found, it is hard to sustain high sales when the iPhone is your competition. The Pre may also suffer from association with Sprint, possible perceived as the weakest service provider among the top three or four. The iPhone’s position is not impregnable, but it continues to be very strong.

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Entry was posted on Monday, June 1st, 2009 at 1:38 pm under Internet, iPhone, iPod Touch.  Print This Post

Read more entries by Michael W. Jones.
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