We all know how successful the iPhone has been, how significant the Blackberry share of Smartphone users is and how quickly the Android users have grown, but how are these three big mobile browser players fairing against each other and how is it going to pan out?

We looked at three sectors from our current client list: Technology, Health & Beauty and Finance. From these sectors we took a year’s worth of data and graphed out the visits from each of the three mobile operating systems.

The data is based on approximately a quarter of a million visits (per month) from mobile users, over the last 12 months. We have used visit share as a comparison, as the number of visits compared would have shown an increase in all three. We intend to have another blog post up next week showing the increase in mobile search in general.

Visit Share for iPhone Blackberry and Android

This first graph shows exactly what you’d expect to see; the iPhone dominates against Android and Blackberry. The distance between them is huge; the iPhone starts with a 97.8% share of the visits this time last year. There is a small but visible rise in the Blackberry and Android OS’s, but it doesn’t seem to be a dramatic leap.

When we put the iPhone values on a secondary axis, to help better display the visit trends, the chart starts to show more clearly how the iPhone is losing its share of visits to Android and Blackberry phones. It’s worth noting again that this isn’t a graph displaying visits, as that would probably show iPhone staying fairly level, it is in fact a portrayal of the share of visits from the 3 mobile internet providers.

Visit Share for iPhone Blackberry and Android – Secondary Axis Display

Here we can see that the iPhone share is really starting to drop, while the much talked about growth of Android phones and their impact on the iPhone market share really becomes apparent. The Blackberry share is also increasing slightly over the year; however their increase is slower than anticipated.

At what point will iPhone Loose?

To answer the question on whether or when the Android phones will match the visits that iPhone users generate is a difficult question. The Android usage appeared to be growing exponentially earlier in the year, but is following a more linear increase now. If it were to increase this way consistently then in around 3.5 years the iPhone would be equally sharing the market with Android phones. However with the release of the HTC Windows Phone 7 smartphones (40,000 sold in 24 hrs in U.S.), we may see the market share change again. According to HTC, they are seeing better than expected sales in Europe and in Australia. This increase in sales is also being experienced by Samsung and LG, who also support the Windows 7 software.