Snowball effect

Via AdMob (read the PDF report) we learn today that the iPhone now generates 55% of all US mobile web traffic, up from a 24% share just one year ago (see here). Meanwhile RIM’s share of mobile web traffic in the US has dropped from 27% last year to only 12% today. Indeed, the Blackberry OS is now #3 behind the iPhone OS and Android OS (which represents 20% of domestic web traffic today, up from 0 a year ago). The trend isn’t just domestic. Over the same period, the iPhone has grown globally from 15% to 50% of all traffic, while RIM has dropped from 10% to just 7% today.

So, we know that, given the current adoption rate and consumer plans for future purchases, sometime next year there should be more iPhones on the market than Blackberries, and that’s assuming Apple doesn’t release a new iteration of the phone (because iPhone adoption spikes with each new release, whereas RIM’s adoption rates remain constant). We know that iPhones have higher customer satisfaction than Blackberries by a wide margin. We know that developers are abandoning other OS environments for the iPhone because they aren’t profitable enough, or don’t have a big enough audience (read: market share).

I’m not saying that Apple has won the mobile wars by any stretch of the imagination (2 years ago, one could have said the same of RIM), but it’s hard to argue with that kind of inertia.