The Google-Apple Mobile Battle

Mobile advertising is all the rage. But determining which operating system captures the biggest share of that booming market depends on what metric you use. From the standpoint of impressions, Google ’s Android takes the cake. It increased its share of mobile-ad impressions to 62.7 percent in the fourth quarter from 37.7 percent in 2014, according to data from Opera Mediaworks, cited by eMarketer. That put it ahead of Apple’s iOS, which had a 27.2 percent share in the fourth quarter, down from 43.4 percent a year earlier. But iOS still dominates on one crucial front: It took 51.7 percent of global mobile-ad revenue in the fourth quarter versus 41.2 percent for Android. Those shares didn’t change much year over year. Apple’s iOS had a 55.7 percent share in the fourth quarter of 2013, while Android’s was 37.7 percent. One explanation: iOS tends to be stronger in developed markets where ad spending is more robust. So while Android accounted for 84.4 percent of smartphone shipments in the third quarter, according to IDC, iOS’s 11.7 percent share may simply have been sent to a bigger-spending part of the world.