I often get frustrated with the way smart phone and tablet market share figures are reported, and then discussed, by some in the analyst community. There seems to be an emphasis on raw unit sales, giving the impression that Apple is losing significant ground to the Android platform and Samsung in particular. Last week I was speaking and participating in a panel session (on behalf of Intellect) within the "Best Practice: Corporate Apps conference". The first speaker, Benedict Evans (@BenedictEvans) from Enders Analysis, presented a better balanced view.

See the slide above which shows Apple, Samsung and the rest in terms of total global mobile handset share, first by units, and then by revenue. The revenue tells the real story - Apple might have less than 10% of the handsets, but they are the premium models giving them close to 25% of the revenue cake. I wonder how this would look if we could see profit too? My guess is Apple would have an even bigger slice. But it's also important to note that Samsung has healthy share of the units, but also revenue - they sell a lot of those Galaxy models along with their other handsets.

Shifting to the tablet market, Apple's position comes in to even sharper focus. Let's ignore the units and revenue and take a look at actual usage across the various International markets. Apple iOS/iPad has around 80% of the usage in every major market. Android has pretty much all the rest, although Bnedict's chart separates out Kindle and Nook.

When you go and talk to mobile app developers the story is the same. For a consumer app where their needs to be a mass market, broad appeal, companies will invest in Android, then Windows Phone and maybe even BlackBerry. However, the lion's share of the general and corporate app development effort goes in to iOS, and when they do have to tackle Android they are frustrated by the many different versions they have to support across the mobile handset and tablet range.

Apple is sticking to the high ground, and is maintaining the numbers that really count - revenue and profit.

Benedict's full "Mobile is Eating the World" slide set is here on Slideshare.