Apple's Ultimate Mobile Dominance Is In Usage, Not Units

We've come a very long way from the pre-iPhone mobile web. Android devices are being activated at the rate of 500,000 per day. Tens of millions of web-capable Blackberries are in consumers' hands. All but the very cheapest phones can show you a webpage on the go. The big story has been Google's operating system, Android. Comscore's latest statistics indicate that Google's smartphone OS market share is 42 percent, while Apple lags at 27 percent.

But this notion of what the mobile web looks like doesn't seem to reflect usage patterns that I've seen. We know that there are tens of millions of smartphones out there, but when we look at who actually uses those devices to access content, we see that iOS device owners use their devices far more than other people, whatever size installed base Google or RIM may claim. As a starting point, here at The Atlantic, the iPod Touch generates more web traffic than any phone by the likes of Motorola, HTC, RIM, or Nokia. Nearly three-quarters of our mobile web traffic comes from just the iPhone, iPad, and iPod. The best performing non-iOS device (Motorola's Droid X) accounted for about 2.5 percent of our mobile usage.