If you’re in the mobile space and you’re not paying attention to Android, you’re not doing your job.

[Warning: there’s going to be a lot of numbers thrown at you here.  I’ll try to make sense of it all in plain English towards the end. –mrh]

About a week ago one of our sponsors, Millennial Media, sent over their monthly SMART report. Buried within the report was an infographic with a new statistic regarding the percent change in ad impressions coming from Android based devices, showing that they were up 25% month-over-month. Mack McKelvey from Millennial told me later that this was “the largest month over month increase the OS has had on our network.”

There is always a wealth of data contained in the SMART report, but the percent change in Android impressions was too juicy of a nugget to go uninvestigated.  In the early adopter set, it’s generally all Apple, all the time.  Barely a day goes by when I don’t see a shared post talking about how ‘Android drools and Apple rules.’

While I was in Austin Michael Sean Wright, who’s an avid user of Brian Roy’s justSignal, happened to show me some signal density charts on brand mentions of various mobile smartphone platforms, and the explosion in Android mentions was undeniable, most of which seemed to have surface during the last thirty days, largely concentrated on Twitter and Youtube. Relative to other smartphone platforms excluding Apple, the real time chatter about Android dwarfed all other platforms, which might be a testament to the connectedness of the early adopter set (and how easy it is to integrate the phone with social platforms) using the platform more than actual usage.

Then, just yesterday, Comscore released even more numbers corroborating the explosive growth of Android.

jkOnTheRun had the best visualization of the data.

Of course, iPhone still dominates most charts in the smartphone market, both in brand presence as well as actual device usage – something that is corroborated in both the original SMART report as well as any other analysis reports you run elsewhere.

And none of the other indicators I polled really seemed to indicate Android eating into Apple marketshare or impression share either, but it was clear that other platforms were either suffering at the hands of Android or giving Android the market opportunity to grow (depending on your perspective, I imagine).

I turned to Google’s own trend monitoring service, Trends, to see if I could find a trailing indicator of the last thirty days growth being reflected in search data.

In the 12-month Google Trends chart I’ve included to the right, you can see the mentions of the Android platform spike sharply at the beginning of the year (when the pre-CES Android launch hype was at it’s height), and then of course sharply decrease. After that there’s a slow rise in interest, with it rising more sharply mid-February while competitors Windows Mobile and Blackberry manufacturer RIM remaining relatively flat.

Making Sense of the Number Soup

The numbers don’t yet point to a clear market trend in terms of Android killing off one or more of their competitors.  Platforms like Palm, RIM, and Windows Mobile, despite very aggressive marketing and selling campaigns aren’t finding the foothold they’re looking for.  That’s more indicative, likely, of the already-dominant position held by Apple in the smartphone world than anything Google’s Android is doing at the moment.

What is clear, is that Android is either already engaged in or is set to achieve meteoric growth. The numbers are pretty clearly pointing to that, and while it looks like this may be mostly new-to-smartphone users, I can’t help but be reminded of the position we took on this during the Nexus One and Google Chrome launch here at SiliconANGLE.

While many of the louder-voiced tech pundits were continuing to frame Google’s launch as an all-out war on everyone else in tech, including Microsoft and Apple, we pointed to a continuing strategy that’s apparent to us from Google’s mobile initiatives – opening new markets:

One of the things I noticed was a lot of the questioners there in the briefing were picking around on the carcass of that dead angle – that this was a play at Microsoft and higher end machines.

I’ve picked through on a few choice quotes from the presenters that show that their intentions were otherwise.

“We’re focused on user needs, not strategies as far as competing with other companies.” – Sergey Brin.

“We’re not focused on expanding out Google Chrome OS to other hardware types. This is not an operating system for full featured laptops, we’re focused on this specific set.”

In other words, some times an operating system is just an operating system.

The same thing is true here.  The cries of all-out war of Google versus Microsoft and Apple have subsided significantly since then, and I think that as these numbers continue to expand to wider mainstream markets, we’ll see that prediction of ours here continue to be supported.