When it comes to Androids and iPhones, we’ve had just about enough emotionally weighted hyperbole over which device is better. For one thing, most of those arguments are subjective projections of personal opinion. For another, hey, they’re just phones; we shouldn’t get so uptight about them.

However, when ad network Chitika approached us with a handful of stats on just how many people use which versions of which mobile operating system, we were too curious to turn down the opportunity to learn more. We’ve known for a while that Android is growing and that the iPhone 4 is massively popular; here are concrete numbers that show exactly to what extent the mobile landscape is changing.

Data was gathered by looking at web impressions from mobile devices across Chitika’s network, which includes more than 80,000 publisher sites.

When you do a straight-up OS to OS comparison, Apple has the lead by a significant margin; iOS traffic accounted for around 55% of mobile OS activity in a recent snapshot, whereas Android devices ran closer to 18% of the total.

While the incumbent iPhone is still the Goliath to be challenged in this industry, the Android OS is growing rapidly — a trend that has been well documented this year alone. The iPhone has a 10-month head start on the Android operating system, but it’s got almost two years in the market over the first Android device (HTC’s Dream). The rapid multiplication of Android-running smartphones can account for much of the platform’s growth over the past two years.

To get an idea of OS versions, Chitika captured data on 9,020,135 devices running an iOS and 7,712,820 devices running some version of Android. This is a snapshot of the larger mobile traffic picture (for comparison, Apple said it sold 8.4 million iPhones in the quarter that the iPhone 4 was released), but we’d imagine that, with a data set of this size, the numbers are likely indicative of general trends.

Where iPhone owners show a distinct advantage is in the ability to quickly upgrade en masse to the latest distribution of the OS. Almost half (49.9%) of all iPhone owners are now running iOS 4, which was just released one month ago.

Android device owners, on the other hand, can be heard lamenting the late arrival of Froyo on every street corner, from every rooftop… Perhaps we’re exaggerating a bit, but the chart below pretty well illustrates this common frustration: Currently, only 1.74% of Android users have the latest distribution of the OS.

Android fans are one group of folks impatient for the arrival of Froyo; developers would be another. The chart above illustrates a complaint often heard from Android devs: The splintering of OS version can make this platform more difficult to develop for.

It’s nice to have some solid numbers on the iPhone versus Android subject; even if they only show a large segment of purchasing and behavior patterns, they shed some very rational light on an intensely and often irrationally debated subject.

What do you make of these stats? Do you think the Android growth curve could possibly overtake the iPhone’s numbers over the next few years?