Mobile: The growth of Android is slower than was iPhone at the same time, but it is less extensively marketed

[AdMob] There is no doubt that Android is growing fast and has made an impact since its launch. The HTC Dream (G1) generates 2% of our US requests and is now the #4 smartphone behind the iPhone, Blackberry Curve, and Blackberry Pearl. Android growth accelerated after our launch of ad units in apps at the end of January, which likely reflects strong consumer usage of applications on the Android platform.

However the question we get most often is – how does Android’s growth compare to iPhone’s growth at launch? Our best answer: both grew more quickly than the market, but iPhone growth was much faster than Android. To put some numbers to this, we found that Android traffic in the US grew an average of 47% per month since it launched five months ago while iPhone traffic in the US grew an average of 88% per month in the five months following the launch of their App Store. See the report for more details on the comparison.

Requests in millions in March 2009
Android 72
US iPhone 607
Worldwide iPhone 995
iPhone and iPod touch 1657

The much faster iPhone growth is not surprising given the far larger installed base of iPhones and the huge marketing push from Apple. In March 2009, we received 8 times more traffic from iPhones in the US today than Android. When you layer in the worldwide footprint, and the fact that the iPod touch is also there, you can see how huge of a headstart the iPhone platform has.

March 2009 Metrics Report