To first order, iPhone owners spend money. Android owners don't. This is because your average iPhone user cares more about what phone they're using and simply uses it more.

This is a first-order approximation. The small percentage of people who actively choose Android do spend and do use their phones a lot, and by goodness are they vocal, but the more useful way of thinking about the market is not two-segment, it's three-segment:

* Vast majority: don't care about their phone OS, won't pay for anything

* Significant minority: want iPhones, will most probably spend money

* Significant but even smaller minority: actively want Android, will buy premium Android phones (e.g. Nexus, high-end Samsung), will either spend money or, with roughly equal likelihood, jailbreak and pirate everything in sight.

From this perspective iOS remains the most compelling mobile OS to target. Additionally, iOS users – on average - use apps more and for longer, though again that effect is small when you control for the kind of Android devices people go out of their way to choose.

That fine if you're trying to make money, but it still annoys me when something like a government or non-profit targets iPhone first.

In fact, I'd say "target the web" if you're going for maximum accessibility and you're not driven by commercial factors, though that doesn't work for every app and the usability/discoverability issues can be real. Favoring any commercial platform as a government is a very uncomfortable place to be.

Given group 1 is many times bigger than group 2, that's a very strong statement, but it's borne out in all the data I've ever seen, both public and private.

More like, is willing to spend $700 on a phone.

The problem with android is that even the "high end" android phones (in the US anyway) are still just wrappers around the snapdragon 8xx SOCs. They're all exactly the same and feel almost as closed as the iphone.

iPhones have a warranty at list price; AppleCare extends it and increases the scope of service.

I do agree that anyone who plans on purchasing an extended warranty for any product research it ahead of time so the total purchase price fits into their budget, though, and the same goes for sales taxes.

FTFY

Because the users who buy things on mobile overwhelmingly use iPhones. All the money to be made is there.

I spoke with Tencent a month ago and they said over half of their users (across wechat/QQ etc...) are on iOS. That was a surprise to me as I thought Android phones completely dominated the Chinese market.

Likely that Android does dominate the Chinese market like the rest of the world.

I think a better way to view it is to segment the mobile device market into 3: high, middle and low end; Apple dominates the high-end market segment. iPhones are still largely considered a status symbol in China.

It's possible iOS users use their phones more, or some variation on that.

I find this very interesting, not that the earnings are so high on Apple, but that Google could be failing so miserably to earn mobile search revenue on their own platform. I feel like there's an accounting error somewhere.

Some first-hand reports:

http://blog.monumentvalleygame.com/blog/2015/1/15/monument-v...

http://www.winterworks.de/bloo-kid-2-the-definitive-revenue-...

In fact, I was about to link to Monument Valley's numbers.

Again, not stating facts, just hypothesis.

Yes, but Android has targetted mostly under-developed countries (sorry if this term seems offensive) and ordinary people (as opposed to iOS which targets rich people). Consequently, many Android users don't have decent devices for internet surfing and even if they had, they don't have permanent access to cheap fast internet.

http://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/comscore-reports-feb...

That's not too far off 50 percent.

https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/statcou...

The average time each user spends using their Android device(s), and those users' average affluence, is so incredibly low that they still only manage to make up 50% of Google's ad revenue on mobile.

iOS users are way more likely to be (relatively) wealthy, and they tend to use their devices more (if you've suffered through using anything other than a top-end Android device from the last couple of OS versions, you can guess what one of several reasons for this may be).

https://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/statcou...

I've also read about other counter-intuitive revenue statistics. Apple's share of hardware revenues is way higher than its share of unit sales. And I've read that for many app makers, their revenues on iOS is higher than their revenues on Android, despite there being a larger number of Android units in the market.

If the latter claim is true, it could be that iOS users as a whole spend more money than Android users as a whole. That could filter through to Google in the form of iOS users being more inclined to click on higher-value ads.

Note: The above is speculative, I recall reading these claims on Daring Fireball, but that is not evidence.