It’s no big secret I’m not a huge fan of Apple.  I earned the derision of my peer groups this morning not recognizing the news value of every utterance Steve Jobs made this morning. Mark Pincus bringing Zynga to the iUniverse? We knew that. Two million iPads sold? We knew that, too. WWDC un-invited Gizmodo? Yep. Netflix works well on iDevices? Look, I’m not even a close follower of Apple news, and I knew that. The iPhone Fourth Gen? Come on, even Jon Stewart did a piece on that.

So what’s new news out of Apple today? In between re-hashing old news and an epic fail of AT&T’s data network during unveiling of the new iPhone, Steve Jobs showed a slide with a little graph that was said to be sourced from market research firm Nielsen talking about the marketshare owned by various smartphone providers.

It caught my attention, because one of the areas I try to focus on is exactly this graph, and how it changes every month (as told by the various analyst firms, Millennial Media’s and AdMob’s monthly stat reports).

The stats that Jobs displayed on stage were reportedly from “first quarter of 2010,” a broad swath of time that could theoretically mean January of 2010 all the way to March of 2010, or one of those months or possibly even an average of those months (Jobs was a little unclear on this).

Still, the graph looked strikingly familiar, so I took a look back into the old coverage of smartphone marketshare data and found the graph that looked closest to the one Jobs showed today.

Turns Out, It Was Millennial Media that Nailed It.

Back in October of 2009 (which, I suppose, is technically Q4’09, not Q1’10), AdMob started releasing their Smartphone marketshare data, which Millennial Media had been doing for some time. AdMob, at the time, was in talks with Google for their eventual acquisition by the company, and either coincidentally or not, started putting out monthly data that showed Android as a major player, with 55% user share.

Millennial Media’s stats showed a much different story, pegging Android usershare at around 8%, and iPhone usershare at around 33%. This jives much closer to Apple/Nielsen’s numbers from around that time, which put iPhone share at 28% and Android share at 9%.

It’s important to pay attention to this seemingly minor datapoint for those in the business of mobile

This is validation of Millennial’s data collection model. Nielsen and Comscore have always signaled under the radar and through the grapevine that Millennial’s marketshare estimates were the most accurate projections out there, but they have always stopped short of saying officially and as much. Today’s numbers from Apple and Nielsen are implicit expressions of endorsement, by virtue of the fact that the numbers line up so nicely.

Why does that matter? It matters because Apple, if you recall, is an advertising company now. With the debut of iAds (which they talked about ever so briefly today at WWDC). While Google’s mobile monetization arm is choosing to go with a metrics method that drastically skews numbers in their favor, Apple has decided to go with a methodology that reflects reality rather than fantasy.

This is the standard going forward for smartphone marketshare data. There seemed to be a race to be second in line for which metrics model would the standard. Comscore and Nielsen for the past 18 months have been very reticent to put their stamp of approval on any sort of marketshare data, calling the field “nascent.” With the rapid growth of Android and Apple’s data being validated by Nielsen, what we’re seeing today is that the best way to measure marketshare is by taking the attention paid by users not only to the app side, but the web side as well (which is how Millennial measures their user-share data).

This data is useful in not only showing us that smartphones have left that “nascent” stage of development, but planning which platforms to attack first as a mobile app developer.

[Editor’s Note: Millennial Media is a sponsor of SiliconANGLE. This is not a sponsored post. –mrh]