Just what do Android users do with their phones?

Good question raised by Business Insider blog.

Androiders vastly outnumber iPhonistas but when it comes to internet use it’s the iPhone and then daylight.

At least in the US, where Android leads iOS in market share 53% to 34%. Yet some 60% of mobile web visits came from iOS devices and only 20% from Android.

An IBM analysis of Black Friday online sales found an even bigger skew: iOS (iPads and iPhones) accounted for nearly 20% of transactions, Android 5.5%.

One partial explanation is that Apple totally owns the tablet segment. Although its dominance is slipping, the IBM study showed 88% of the tablet traffic was iOS.

But it still leaves the poser about why Android owners keep their phone in their pocket. The answer, of course, has huge implications across the mobile value chain.

The most plausible explanation I’ve seen far comes from Josh Marshall, publisher of Talking Points Memo - a political blog with a watching brief on tech. TPM’s own traffic figures site illustrate the trend. Around 23% of visitors are on mobile devices and of those 77% are iOS and just 21% Android.

Marshall thinks it might be “some mix of affluence and power-use."

If you’re really focused on living through your mobile device — shopping with it, constantly accessing news on it, getting really focused on apps, you’re far more likely to buy an iPhone. The demographics of affluence clearly play a significant factor as well. I suspect that’s why our audience for instance is even more tilted toward iOS than most.

Or maybe it's all about price.

As Marshall points out, handset brands have upgraded a lot of the mobile population onto smartphones in the past 18 months. Most of those are Android users. By definition they're not early adopters, and they may have upgraded for reasons of price, or fashion, or the ability to cut costs with OTT apps.

What will it take to make tham active on the mobile web? Is there a ‘killer app’ (a long time since I’ve written that phrase) out there? Or is US data pricing playing the key role in suppressing usage? 

Which is a prompt for a post on iOS vs Android in Asia. Let me fossick around.