+100.

I split my time between a large metro, a smaller metro and rural farmland. My unscientific breakdown is this.

Metro areas are serviced by multiple carriers, many of which offer both iPhones and Android smartphones. In my metro areas, I think iPhones beat Android devices by a few percentage points (10-15% maybe) as more and more Android smartphones hit the market.

Rural areas are serviced by 2-3 carriers, max. Often it's just one primary and one secondary carrier. None of these carriers--in the areas I frequent--offer the iPhone. It's safe to say Android devices are near 100% market penetration.

Were you to do a county-by-county breakdown (or metro vs rural), I think you'd see a huge difference. Were I developing an app for agriculture, iPhones wouldn't even come into consideration.

Yeah, that would provide a much clearer picture. Though I'd guess that the iOS/Android market share is highly correlated with the dominant wireless carriers in the area. Since iPhones were initially exclusive to AT&T, I'd expect areas with a high percentage of AT&T users to have the most iOS users. When smartphones were first becoming popular, users on other carriers (e.g. Verizon) didn't have the option of purchasing iPhones, so they purchased Androids.

And this distribution probably still holds today, since most users don't switch back and forth between both operating systems.

What two factors are supposed to be correlated? I don't think the usage of "red state" and "blue state" is meant to imply that liberalism/conservatism is correlated with OS choice. They just co-opted a visualization commonly used for political leanings to show mobile OS choice.

Between what and what exactly?

> In this article, we’ve broken down mobile website traffic in the US according to mobile OS.

It doesn't try to find a correlation between mobile OS usage and something else.

Red and blue are connected by purple!

This. Carriers would distort any phone-based metrics in the US, as there are certain areas of the country where AT&T isn't available, and thus had minimal iPhone market penetration until the 4 came out on Verizon.

AT&T didn’t have much for rural coverage in northern Minnesota and many parts of North Dakota, but got much better with the purchase of Cellular One (no surprise; add needed towers, get reception, get users).

However, that acquisition was a while ago. I’m sure nothing is overnight. Still, not much is truly revealed about these numbers. This article still leaves me unsatisfied.

My anecdote from growing up in that area is that North Dakotans kept buying dumbphones until the iPhone was available.

Good observation, correction for coverage maps is a good idea. Another correction which might be relevant on a smaller-than-state scale would be distance from nearest apple iStore.

how does the color blind decides how not to waste his vote in a national election?

i joke. i joke...