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New heat map plots Twitter mobile usage across cities; Android dominates in India

New heat map plots Twitter mobile usage across cities; Android dominates in India

By Anupam Saxena | Updated: 21 June 2013 14:03 IST

A new heat map by MapBox that plots geotagged tweets since September 2011 across 280 million unique locations offers interesting insights including the usage of different smartphone platforms.

The map traces mobile devices usage across regions via 'metadata' stored in each tweet. This includes information about phone brand/ OS and location, amongst other information. It is worth noting that the heat map only consider tweets made via the official Twitter App, and tweets from Web browsers and third-party Twitter clients don't appear on this map.

While Twitter use and smartphones are still not very prevalent in India, and the map doesn't give the complete picture of mobile platforms used, it does offer some details about the metros and tier-2 and 3 cities where people use Twitter through their mobile devices.

If you look at the cities of Delhi, Mumbai, Bangalore, and Chennai, you'll notice that Android dominates, followed by iPhone and BlackBerry. Interestingly, it appears that users of other platforms don't tweet through their phones. This would also include Windows Phone devices, which in a way proves that Indian twitter users are not really buying these devices or are not using them to tweet.

Within regions, even Indian cities follow a pattern that's observed across the world, with iPhone usage coming from affluent locations, while Android usage being scattered throughout. Taking the example of Delhi, we see South and Central parts of the city showing more tweets from iPhone users while Android users are scattered all over but even their concentration is higher in the two parts of the city that also implies that these dominate smartphone use. BlackBerry use is also scattered but pales in comparison to Android.

One interesting trend that emerges from the map is that Android has even invaded smaller towns such as Warangal, Jabalpur, Kanpur, Kurnool and Belgaum.

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