These maps showing the locations of 280 million individual posts on Twitter shows a depressing divide in America*: Tweets coming from Manhattan tend to skew in favor of iPhones. Tweets coming from Newark, N.J., index more heavily from Android phones.
The map was created by Mapbox, which markets beautiful mapping software. You can use it to zero in on your ZIP code and see how your neighborhood breaks down.
Even within Manhattan, the iPhone / Android divide picks out the wealthier neighborhoods from the poorer ones. Here is the split along the border of the Village (think brownstones and chic little designer stores) and Chinatown and the Lower East side (noodle joints and bodegas, plus a large public housing complex).
In this map, the red iPhone users are layered on top of the green Android users.
You can see the trendy neighborhoods in the heart of the city are dominated by iPhone. Android users are heavy in the downtown area also. But in the southern areas, less so.
The maps illustrate a debate among app developers and mobile tech execs about the apparent socio-economic divide between users of the two largest mobile platforms in the world, Apple's iOS and Google's Android.
Here is an even more dramatic one. Everyone knows that the Miami Beach area of Florida is where the rich go to play.
Note that Miami Beach, the airport, and the roads that link them are picked out as iPhone territory — rich people can afford to fly, after all — but the less desirable neighborhoods near the runways are empty of Android users.
The android users are less dense around Miami Beach but can be found near the airport. More interestingly, they skew more towards roads off the main highway to the airport — including near a set of trailer parks.
Cennydd Bowles, a U.K.-based design lead at Twitter, raised the issue recently in a thoughtful article on Medium titled, "Why don't designers take Android seriously?" He wanted to know why app developers don't like working for Android: "It's likely that Android will reach a larger proportion of humanity than any comparable technology, if it hasn't already."
Android has about an 80% market share in some areas of the world. "Android is the dominant platform of the next decade. Why aren't designers paying it more attention?" Bowles asked.
The ... replies were mostly variations on the theme that Android users don't pay for apps, they don't have data plans, you can't monetize them easily, and designers are all iPhone users and don't really understand Android users.
A socio-economic split on class lines, in favor of iPhone over Android.
Note the recurring theme: Android users are less lucrative than iPhone users, and designers are iPhone users. It's a socio-economic split on class lines, in favor of iPhone over Android.
Only on phones do Android users spend more.
But if you look at the dominant share of iPad as a shopping device and how much iPad users spend — $155 on 87% of visits — it's almost as if Apple users do their shopping on iPad and only use their phones for the loose-change stuff.
The average sales price (ASP) for iPhones over time: Note that it remains high, and there is little discounting.
That "loose change," unfortunately, is roughly the most that Android users spend, on average.
This finding has been repeated — broadly — by IBM, which monitors holiday shopping on mobile devices. From Black Friday through Christmas Day, iOS users spent $93.94 per order, nearly twice that of Android users, who spent just $48.10.
Simon Khalaf, CEO of Flurry, one of the larger mobile advertising platforms, recently told Business Insider the same thing: "We have seen and published reports that an Android user is worth one-quarter of an iOS user, but that is based on virtual goods sales (mainly games). The IBM data seems to suggest that this is almost the same ratio for sales of physical goods (m-commerce)."
The economic split between Apple and Android isn't surprising, given that Apple generally demands $600 to $700 for an iPhone, and rarely tolerates discount pricing of its newest models. The chart above shows how consistent iPhone pricing is over time.
Apple just doesn't do discounts.
The Moto G, Google's Android that costs just $200 in the U.S.
There are some fantastic high-end, high price Android phones. But all the talk is about the cheap ones. At the recent Mobile World Conference in Barcelona — a huge mobile industry confab — the buzz was about the Chinese Android companies marketing smartphones for just $35.
Kantar Worldpanel ComTech says that the Moto G was particularly popular with men aged 16-24 in "lower income" groups: 83% of buyers were male, and 40% have annual earnings of below £20,000.
There may be signs this is changing.
I do hope, given tech's rhetoric about changing the world and disrupting outdated hierarchies, that we don't really think only those with revenue potential are worth our attention. A designer has a duty to be empathetic; to understand and embrace people not like him/herself. A group owning different devices to the design elite is not a valid reason to neglect their needs.
*Correction: The original version of this story did not account for a flaw in Mapbox's maps. The iPhone users are layered on top of the Android users, making Android usage appear less dense in some areas. We have deleted some of those maps and created new ones showing iPhone and Android usage separately.