It is often said that a person’s mobile phone can not only disclose his income but can also foretell the part of the town where he lives. new maps generated by a research study show that in the biggest cities of the world, Apple’s iPhone owners live in rich areas, whereas the residents of the areas having lower income own an Android phone. The map below shows that Apple product owners (shown in red) live in central areas while Android owners (shown in green) prefer to live in suburbs of the cities.
As per the app makers and promoters, the owners of iPhone spend and download a lot more apps as compared to Android users. In the past few years, android is becoming very popular and has been favored by many low cost handset makers. Nevertheless, Apple does charge a premium on its products. Even its iPhone 5C is much more costly than an Android handset.
Consistent with the latest figures, the total downloads from the Apple App Store are 50 billion, which are still more than newly advertised 48 billion downloads from Google Play’s.
MapBox and Gnip are the companies that conducted this study and made the maps. MapBox said, “Mobile Devices is a map that reveals the information about phone brands that is stored when people use an official Twitter App and is hidden in the metadata attached to each tweet.”
A different color has been provided to each brand of phone which can be changed independently. “The patterns of usage in each city often reflect economic stratification. For example iPhones, in red, are predominantly in wealthy sections of the city while Android phones, in green, have more coverage in poorer sections.”
“We were brought in by the data team at Gnip, who have awesome APIs and raw access to the Twitter firehose, and together Tom and data artist Eric Fischer used our open source tools to visualize the data and build interfaces that let you explore the stories of space, language, and access to technology.”
However, there are no sweeping statements. Not every android user is poor and not every Apple user is rich. This study shows the trends in consumers when it comes to smartphone usage.
Do you agree to this study? Let us know in the comments section below.