Twitter sees 40% of photos from iOS as Photos app becomes 7th largest client

Apple's handheld devices now account for more than 39% of the photos being posted on Twitter's social networking service, with Twitter-integrated built-in apps helping iOS 5 become one of its top 10 sharing clients.

A study released on Thursday revealed that at least 2 out of 5 tweeted photos come from Apple products. Also of note, the company's own Photo and Camera apps in iOS 5 already account for 5 percent of all photo uploads to Twitter, making it the seventh largest client on the network, according to online photo search engine Skylines.

The study analyzed over 24 million Twitter photos posted during the week of Oct. 22, finding that iOS's 39% share was comprised of a combination of Twitter's iPhone app, Instagram and iOS 5's built-in Photo and Camera apps. The actual percentage of photos uploaded to the micro-blogging service from Apple devices could be much higher, however, as posts from the web or multi-platform apps like Tweetdeck and Echofon may also have come from iOS.

Twitter's official iPhone app is ranked as having the highest share of photos, with 21 percent, followed by 17 percent coming from Web posts. The iOS-only Instagram app takes the third spot and is followed closely by Twitter's BlackBerry app, with 13 percent and 12 percent respectively. The Twitter client for Android accounts for 10 percent of photos posted.

Twitter announced earlier this year that it would work together with Photobucket to offer first-party photo features for its service. Recently, that partnership overtook third-party clients like TwitPic and yFrog to become the micro-blogging platform's photo sharing leader, hosting over one third of all tweeted photos, as noted by The Next Web.

Skylines also found that users of various clients and mobile platforms seem to prefer specific services. For instance, 42 percent of photos uploaded to Twitter's official photo service came from the Twitter app on the iPhone, while 47 percent of yFrog photos came from the Twitter client on BlackBerry devices. TwitPic sees 39 percent of its photos come from Twitter for Android.

iOS 5 was released on Oct. 12 and has seen rapid adoption. According to a recent study, 38 percent of iPhone users and 30 percent of iPad users had upgraded to iOS 5 by the week of Oct. 22.

The close integration of Twitter and iOS 5 has worked out nicely for the social network. Dick Costolo, Twitter's chief executive, revealed last month that daily signups for the service from iOS devices tripled after the release of iOS 5. He even went so far as to call Apple a "corporate mentor" for the startup.

Since launching in 2006, Twitter has grown to more than 250 million tweets a day and over 100 million global active users.