Android wins global battle of the phones

It’s over Apple, pack up your R&D departments, stop the machinery and set aside the half-finished production run of the iPhone 13. Android has been crowned the winner of all things mobile, apparently. How, you might ask, has this been decided? Well, through a social media study it seems, solidifying it as absolute fact. 

The story starts with Electronics Hub, which sent bots online to determine the amount of positive and negative sentiment about Android and iPhones. Using something called SentiStrength these decision-making bots trawled through Tweets to establish how people felt about the competing mobile platforms. Take a wander to the Electronics Hub site if you want to see all the maps, and the breakdowns. 

Across most of the world the sentiment was more positive for Android than it was for Apple’s iPhone. There are some notable exceptions. The Mexicans, Ecuadorians, Bolivians and Argentinians all have good things to say about the iPhone than Brazilians, who love them some Android. The USA falls very slightly in favour of Android too. Ireland, on the other hand, can’t get enough of Apple while British people somehow prefer the green robot in their lives. 

• These are the best phones of 2021
• These are the best Android phones of 2021
• And here are the best iPhones

Overall though, Apple does in in Europe. After being tagged in 340,000 Tweets both companies wrestled for the apparently loyalty of citizens, and Apple won 20 countries to Android’s 17. The Italians love an iPhone, for example, as to the Norwegians and the Greeks. Belarus is an outlier in this survey though, with people split down the middle over which operating system they would go to war over. 

While this survey is just a bit of fun it is a reminder of one gift the internet has given us. Division. It’s no longer possible to take a position in the middle, you must now be entirely behind one thing, or its opposing thing. We have, as a society, entirely lost track of the fact that the middleground is where the majority live. 

For one thing, most people probably don’t have a particularly strong opinion on their phone. Presumably, they like it when it works well and hate it when it doesn’t work so well. Anyway, life’s probably too short to spend it angry and inanimate objects.