People in Techie Cities Favor Apple Devices Over Android, Study Says

People who live in tech hubs such as the Bay Area or New York tend to prefer Apple mobile devices over those running Google’s Android operating system, according to new data from Crittercism, a mobile application management company.

San Francisco, New York and San Diego are among the U.S. cities where residents are most likely to be using an Apple mobile device, the firm found. Android devices are most popular in the less tech-centric areas of San Antonio, Phoenix and Detroit.

Crittercism operates a mobile application service that monitors apps for errors and performance issues. The data came from analyses of performance data from its one billion active users worldwide.

While the firm’s data suggests that Apple mobile devices are far more popular than Android competitors in some major American metro areas, Android still leads the U.S. in overall share of the mobile market.

By the end of last year, about 156 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones. Phones running some version of Android had about 51.5 percent of the market, according to market research firm comScore. Apple had about 42 percent market share with BlackBerry and Windows phones accounting for most of the rest.

The data was released as Apple developers are gathering in San Francisco for the company’s annual Worldwide Developers Conference, which starts Monday.

If Apple, as expected, unveils the next version of its iOS mobile OS this week, users are likely to adopt it relatively quickly. More than 80 percent of iOS users update to the newest version of the operating system within three months of its release, a different Crittercism report found.

Apple said this week that roughly 88 percent of iPhone users have upgraded to iOS7.

But while iPhone and iPad users are happy to update their existing devices, they’re not so quick to upgrade.

The iPhone 5 is still more widely used than the iPhone 5s in all but two of the largest metro areas around the U.S., Crittercism found. In one of those two cities – El Paso – residents favored the Samsung Galaxy SIII, instead.

This article originally appeared on Recode.net.

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