Mapping iPhone And Android Users In A City Reveals Wealthier Areas

An aerial view of New York City. Red dots are iPhones. Green is for Android. Blackberry is that little bit of purple.

Over at The Atlantic, a fascinating study has been published that connects location data from smartphones with the layout of a heavily populated city. The findings are that the most iPhone activity is coming from wealthier areas, while Android usually dominates lower income districts. 

That picture comes from a new series of navigable maps visualizing some three billion global, geotagged tweets sent since September of 2011, developed by Gnip, MapBox and dataviz guru Eric Fisher. They’ve converted all of that data from the Twitter firehose (this is just a small fraction of all tweets, most of which have no geolocation data) into a series of maps illustrating worldwide patterns in language and device use, as well as between people who appear to be tourists and locals in any given city.

The above image of New York City is telling. The closer you get to downtown, the more people are tweeting from iPhones (although there is a significant amount of Blackberry activity in Manhattan, which includes the financial district of Wall Street). The patch of Android devices is Newark, an area where the median income for a household is $32,542.

Studies like this prove how our smartphones say a lot about us. Head on over to The Atlantic to check out more cities.

Categories: iPhone , map