One rather fascinating detail has emerged from Pornhub's year-end stats rundown, as it exposes the percentage of visitors accessing the site from an Android or Apple device, adding a new perspective to the age-old smartphone war.
Pornhub is by far the biggest adult video platform on the web and one of the internet's most-visited sites overall, and that makes its yearly 'wrapped'-style recaps a fascinating look at the world of online pornography.
You're able to see all of the usual statistics like the year's most-searched terms and how much each country spends on average during each visit, but there are also some unexpected trends that emerge, like the dramatic increase in podcast-related searches and which movie characters and games people are searching for the most.
One area that you might not have considered though is the split between smartphone operating systems, especially as mobile devices are the predominant way that people access adult content these days, with Pornhub reporting an 87 percent market share compared to 11 percent on desktop PCs.
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Looking at traffic by operating system on smartphones, Android won by a considerable margin with 67.7 percent – over two thirds – of site visits coming from non-Apple devices, with iOS picking up 'just' 33.1 percent.
While this might surprise some considering the popularity of the iPhone, you do have to consider that Android in the OS of choice for almost every other smartphone available, including all of Apple's key rivals like Samsung, Google, and Xiaomi.
On top of this, Android traffic increase by 3.6 percent compared to 2024's numbers, whereas the number of iOS visits decreased by a staggering 4.9 percent year-on-year.
This isn't necessarily surprising when considering the far lower price of entry for Android phones compared to their Apple counterparts, and this largely aligns with the estimated 71.9 percent global market share that Android has according to Statcounter, although Apple has a higher representation in Pornhub traffic compared to its estimated 27.6 percent global market share.
Another illuminating statistic emerges when you look at the traffic share for operating systems compared to web browsers, as it shows that a lot of Apple users still opt for Chrome over Safari across both mobile and desktop.
While iOS devices account for 33.1 percent of traffic, just 23.1 percent of visits on mobile came through the Safari browser, indicating that around 10 percent of iPhone users opted for Chrome or another alternative like Firefox.
The same is true when looking at Mac traffic, as while Mac OS devices were responsible for 20.3 percent of all desktop traffic, only 13.3 percent of that came from Safari.
VR usage also appears to have seen a major boost compared to 2024 despite Mark Zuckerberg's dreams of the metaverse being abandoned, as desktop traffic from Meta Quest devices increased by 47.5 percent.