The developers behind Unity, a game engine integrated into a myriad of mobile games, have published a breakdown of the operating systems playing their games as well as the hardware that run them. The Unity game engine is implemented in a wide range of both Android and iOS games, including Rovio's "Bad Piggies," "Mini Motor Racing" and more. About 200 million users were tracked by the company, giving a broad perspective on the mobile landscape.
According to the results:
- iOS adoption is rapid. 86% of iOS devices which have a game powered by Unity are running iOS 6 (or 6.1), the latest version of iOS which was released last year. iOS 5, which isn't much older than a year, still has about 10% of the iOS installs. This means that Apple can tell developers than 96% of iOS customers are using a new operating system that was released within a year.
- The same can't be said for Android, which has an adoption rate of just 68% for Android 4 (including 4.1 and 4.2), the latest version. Android 2.3, which is over two years old, still has an install base of 27%. Android 2.3 does not support the latest APIs, making Android an unattractive platform to develop on. The remaining 5% is taken up by Android 2.2 (2%) and Android 3.x versions (3%).
While iOS is behind on some matters, OS updates are not one of them. In less than a year, iOS 6 has reached a install base that Google can only dream of.
Unity developers also collect data on hardware.
- The majority of Unity-based games on iOS are played on the iPhone 4S, which holds a 17.8% share, closely followed by the iPhone 5 (16.4%). Overall, the iPhone accounts for 50.6% of all iOS hardware, according to Unity's data. The iPad follows close behind with a 34% total share. The iPad mini, which was released late-2012, already has a 5.6% share, larger than that of the iPod touch 5th generation. The iPod touch makes up the remaining 16%.
- Android is a different matter. The field is dominated by Samsung, who take a whopping 54.7% share. For contrast, Sony is second with a measly 8.6% share. Unity's results fall perfectly inline with the fact that Samsung and Apple dominate the mobile field, taking 99% of all profits. After Sony comes LG (6.6%), HTC (6.4%), Amazon (4.5%), Motorola (2.7%) and Google (2.7%). From Unity's results, it is very clear who has won the Android OEM crown.
The results are not overly surprisingly. The iPhone is the most popular Apple product, and Samsung is the king of Android. The data does illustrate just how far ahead Samsung is, with a 47% lead over Sony, its nearest rival.
Unity's developers also measure the type of CPU used on each device. Single-core processors are at around 27% usage on both Android and iOS. The rest of iOS uses dual-core (introduced in the 4S), while a quarter of Android phones uses 4 cores.
Source: Unity Blog | Image via CNET
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