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Apple is the choice of techie cities, study says

Research by mobile app management firm Crittercism says Android is more popular in places such as Phoenix and Detroit.

Chris Matyszczyk
3 min read

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Is it love that persuades techie cities to marry Apple? Apple

Your loins are possibly still throbbing after the multifarious, multicolored announcement at the Apple WWDC presentation.

Either that, or your fists are curling in heated woe at how much techies seem to care about this.

Whichever it may be, I feel sure that such a concentration of Apple products in the quintessentially techie city, San Francisco, might make you wonder if techie cities are, well, different from normal ones.

In normal cities, large corporate buses don't swamp neighborhoods and leave their clean, green impression all over the place.

In normal cities, they probably greeted today's WWDC with a mere wondering if it was something to do with wrestling.

How timely, then, that there is research suggesting people in techie cities are rather partial to Apple products, while the more normal places choose Android.

Recode has pointed my curiosity toward a study performed by Crittercism. This seems not to be a site where you tell your dog he's been a bad boy and ask your parrot to quit the squawking.

Instead, it manages the performance of your mobile apps. Yes, it's one of the approximately 47 million companies in America that offers "solutions."

Its research shows that the mobile solutions for so many in techie cities are sponsored by Apple. Stunningly, San Francisco and New York seem to be the most passionate hubs of Apple platform usage.

These two allegedly liberal, progressive, and curiously self-righteous places embrace Apple more than any other cities in the nation.

They are swiftly followed by two cities which, perhaps, would like to grow up and be San Francisco and New York one day: San Diego and Philadelphia.

These results were gleaned from an analysis of performance data from what Crittercism says are its 1 billion users worldwide.

Should you be of an Androidian persuasion, you'll be lifting your cudgel or mace and ready to swing. Or, perhaps, to move house.

So let me tell you that the hotbeds of Android are San Antonio, Phoenix, and Detroit. While you cogitate about which of these you'd most like to live in, I'll tell you that one of America's most underrated cities was fourth on the Android love scale: Houston.

Some will conclude that there are economic factors here. Android tends to have far cheaper options than does Apple. And people in New York and San Francisco have far too much money.

Yet surely the Galaxy S series of phones, as well as the HTC One have made Android phones far more palatable to some style-conscious eyes.

Could it be that there is as great a schism as this research implies? These figures suggest that San Francisco, for example, is 80 percent iOS, while San Antonio is 65 percent Android.

Are these techie cities buying into an illusion? Or is it simply that they know cachet when they see it?

Do many Android users wish they could afford Apple, and simply settle for something else? Or do they firmly believe that the Emperor of Style is, in fact, naked?

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A divided country? Crittercism