Android phones leave the most active social media users (women) cold
There’s been a lot written about Android one day becoming the windows of smartphones – i.e the system that most of us will be using. For example, last week Nielsen said that in the US Android is now the most popular operating system among people who bought a smartphone in the past six months (though according to Comscore, iPhones are still ahead in Europe).
One potential problem though. Most of those buyers seem to be men. That’s at least if you believe a study conducted by ‘Lady Geek‘ (Belinda Palmer) here in the UK among 78k participants (source 1000 Breaking News). The full research (entitled ‘Android has a Dude Problem’) will be presented at Droidcon on 28 and 29 October.
However, preliminary results show that less than 5% of women aged 25-39 picked an Android phone as their next smartphone, compared to 11.4% of men.
An AdMob study earlier this year (see chart above) found the same, that 73% of Android users were men.
Why does it even matter? I mean, you could argue that just as the whole online arena shifted from initially being male dominated, so will Android phones once the market matures. The problem for the Android sector however is this:
First of all mobile devices are – slowly – becoming the online device of choice for younger age groups.
Ofcom in the UK showed that the mobile phone is now the second most essential form of media for 16-24 year olds behind the TV (for other age groups, the PCs+Internet is no 2). Similarly according to Pew Research in the US, cell phones are more of a ‘necessity’ among 18-29 year olds than computers – while for the 30+ audience the position is reversed.
Secondly, mobile social networking is already female dominated. A Nielsen study at the end of last year showed that (in the US) women account for 55% of mobile social network usage.
Read Write Web points to initial Android marketing which was “clearly male targeted” as a way of both appealing to serious male geeks, and to put distance between itself and ‘pretty’ iPhones. That might have worked when it came to carving out short term market share.
But in the long term, as both Lady Geek’s and AdMob’s research shows, it means that the very audience that is most active in social media – women under 30 – won’t be participating the Android revolution anytime soon.
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Found your site on Google…Great post! I look forward to reading more from your site.
I actually came across your article listed at Aol news earlier in the telephone section so I thought I’d let you know. I tried to give feedback on one of the other stories two times but didn’t get it to load.
IMHO, it really comes down to understanding the target market – male or female. For the serious geek, Android is nothing more than a miniature computer that makes phone calls. It’s all about the apps. Given the fact that so much communications is happening via messaging these days, does the fact that it makes phone calls even matter? Yes, of course it does.
Thanks Paul and perhaps – as the Read Write Web piece I mention above says, Android marketing has been very much male focused, inviting techies to forsake the ‘frills’ of the iPhone.
With iPhone awareness so high and women driving social media, handset makers such as HTC will need to change that focus going forward.
At the risk of sounding extremely sexist, does this not simply reflect the fact that the majority of people interested in the tech side of mobile are men? The iPhone is ubiquitous, and many people (especially women, in my experience) jump straight to it when they think of smartphones. Those more likely to investigate the tech and make a decision based on that are men.
To my mind, Android is still in an ‘early adopter’ phase (despite the numbers), and given another 12 months there will be more awareness as the likes of HTC in particular become more prevalent.