Tatsuhiko Miyagawa's Blog

iOS dominates Podcast audience

March 09, 2014

This shouldn’t surprise anybody, but most of the podcast subscribers use iOS applications.

Podcast Consumption as easy as Angry Birds — Official Libsyn Blog

If you want to geek out in stats a little bit more: on the mobile side there was a 4.76:1 ratio for downloads to iOS devices directly vs downloads to Android devices.I did some quick analysis on my show, and here’s the number:

  • 55% of the subscribers use Apple Podcasts.app
  • 20% uses iTunes (Mac and Windows combined)
  • 9% uses Downcast.
  • 8% uses Android, combining all clients. Among Android, most popular clients are: Pocket Casts, Rebuild.fm (by rejasupotaro) and Podkicker, which makes sense because I recommended them in the guide.

so this is more like 9:1 ratio for iOS and Android. I guess the reasons are:

  • iOS is getting even more popular in Japan (some articles back this up)
  • Android Podcast clients suck
  • Few listeners might have multiple devices, both iOS and Android, and they prefer iOS to listen to podcasts. I like Pocket Casts for Android, but it’s paid, and is not as slick as Castro for iOS. And Google doesn’t ship any Podcast clients for Android (Listen was dead a while ago).