AdMob: Android is the fastest growing operating system

According from the latest report from AdMob, the Android operating system was the fastest growing year-over-year. Android's share of smartphone requests increased from 2% in February 2009 to 24% in February 2010.

Gizmodo confims that AdMob sees "a predictable continuation of what we'd seen before from the ad tracking firm—specifically, that Android is on a serious tear, thanks in no small part to the massive success of the Droid. But before, the iPhone seemed unassailable. Now, it's about to get trumped by Google's OS, on terms it defined. In the US, that is. The rest of the world's still warming to Android."

For this month's report, AdMob separate the traffic in our network into three categories – smartphones, feature phones, and mobile Internet devices – to examine the growth rates of
each over the past year. The chart above illustrates worldwide monthly traffic share in the AdMob network from each category of device.

* In February 2010, smartphones accounted for 48% of AdMob’s worldwide traffic, up from 35% in February 2009. The strong growth of iPhone and Android traffic, fueled by heavy
application usage(2), was primarily responsible for the increase. In absolute terms, smartphone traffic increased 193% over the last year.

* Feature phones declined from 58% to 35% of AdMob's total traffic as users began switching to smartphones.(3) Although the share of traffic from feature phones as a category
declined, in absolute terms traffic grew 31% year-over-year.

* The mobile Internet devices category experienced the strongest growth of the three, increasing to account for 17% of traffic in AdMob’s network in February 2010. The iPod touch
is responsible for 93% of this traffic; other devices include the Sony PSP and Nintendo DSi. In absolute terms, mobile Internet device category traffic increased 403%.

To download the full report on PDF click here.