Comments on: Apple continues to dominate mobile browsing

By: Martin Hill

Martin Hill — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 01:41:56 +0000

Wikipedia’s OS usage share page agrees with Net Applications data.

It reports operating system web browsing stats from StatOwl, Global Counter, W3Counter, WebMasterPro, Net Market Share, Clicky Web Analytics, AT Internet and WikiMedia:

All of these analytic sources report that iOS has between 2.22% and 5.15% of global web traffic compared to Android which only has between 0.5% and 1.84%.

By: Martin Hill

Martin Hill — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 01:34:58 +0000

The browser stats are not skewed as much by the iPad as you think. Here are the stats by country from comScore’s May 2011 Device Essential report:

Mobile phones:
iPhone Android
Canada 34.60% 8.20%
Brazil 21.00% 11.70%
Germany 35.10% 16.20%
Spain 34.20% 22.10%
France 34.30% 17.10%
Singapore 51.90% 10.00%
Australia 50.00% 10.50%
U.S. 23.50% 35.60%
U.K. 29.90% 15.10%
Chile 45.20% 13.90%
Argentina 12.50% 23.20%
Japan 49.50% 30.60%
India 2.80% 6.00%

The overall OS stats are even more interesting:

iOS captured 53.1% of all non-computer web traffic in the USA versus only 35.6% for Android.
In Canada and Australia, iOS captured an enormous 83% versus 8.6% and 11% respectively for Android.
In the UK iOS captured 60% versus 15.4% for Android.

Brazil: iOS= 83% Android= 8.6%
Singapore: iOS= 82.9% Android= 11.4%
Chile: iOS= 64.1% Android= 14.5%
Argentina: iOS= 31.6% Android= 23.6%
Japan: iOS= 65.5% Android= 30.6%
India: iOS= 7.4% Android= 6.5%

By: Martin Hill

Martin Hill — Mon, 05 Sep 2011 01:24:47 +0000

@ihbrune,
Statcounter doesn’t count the iPad so does not give a useful comparison of each respective OS share.

By: Mike Templeton

Mike Templeton — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 16:43:26 +0000

And guess where I’m reading this article? In the Safari browser on my iPad. Most surprising to me was how far behind BlackBerry is in usage. Maybe now we’ll have justification for leaving them out when developing?

By: Pierre French

Pierre French — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 08:40:52 +0000

Really? do you have datas or reports that support that assertion “reach is more important than usage”? what about ad backed apps or website where usage and ads exposure are clearly heavily correlated? the users base of ios is larger than android’s so anyway developers are winning with apple.

By: Pranay Patel

Pranay Patel — Sat, 03 Sep 2011 04:49:59 +0000

thankful to you. Really its an awesome view of exploring the apple’s gadget. I think this is the strategy why it is top of the table. Apple is always trying to give something new. Thank you again.

By: Patrick Iversen

Patrick Iversen — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 23:22:12 +0000

Agreed. First thing I did when getting a iphone was to download a alternate browser because of the poor tabs interface. I went with sleipner and it has served me well. Opera mini and sleipner fortunately share the same trait with the tabs in the bottom which is better for navigation (in my opinion) since I use thumb navigation a lot. That and long pressing a link automatically opens it in a background tab, gotta love features :).

By: Richard Garrett

Richard Garrett — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 19:18:00 +0000

I think the legal comparison to IE is interesting but perhaps because Apple manufactures the hardware to which the software is tightly bound they avoid the challenges that resulted in IE being removed from the desktops of Windows machines, none of which were made by Microsoft.

By: Michael Manmoney

Michael Manmoney — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 17:43:48 +0000

Have you heard about the new CIBC App for investors? You can make trades with it. http://www.cibcwidget.com transparency http://tinyurl.com/3tphd86

By: Lucian Armasu

Lucian Armasu — Fri, 02 Sep 2011 16:22:23 +0000

The data is misleading. It’s browser usage, not number of users. There are 150 million Android devices, and 200 million iOS devices. So if the Android browser has about 15%, then the iOS browser would have about 20%. So it’s not at all like in IE’s case, because IE dominated “number of users” not browser usage.

The reason the iOS browser gets so much more usage compared to the Android browser and the others, and compared to its actual number of users, is because the “usage” is heavily skewed by the iPad browser, where people use it for a lot longer than they would use a smartphone browser (be that Android or iPhone).

Reach (number of users) matters a lot more to developers than browser usage. The usage just happens to be bigger on iPad because browsing is easier than on a phone there, just like it’s easier on a laptop.

Net Apps did something misleading like this last month too, by adding the iOS browser share to the previous month’s desktop Safari market share, and then claimed something like “Safari grew the fastest last month, now bigger than Chrome”, or something like that. Completely misleading as the mobile browser is not the same thing with a desktop browser.