One per cent of world's web browsing happens on iPad The iPad now accounts for over one per cent of worldwide web browsing – and in the US, that figure jumps to 2.1 per cent. So says the latest Net Applications NetMarketShare report, which also adds that mobile browsing has surpassed 5 per cent worldwide (over 8.2 per cent in the US). Worldwide iPad web-browsing chart The …
That's for sure. If you did either you would understand just how significant this statistic is. You're talking about a world of devices attached to the Internet, from multiple suppliers and in multiple countries rich and poor. Devices representing a significant portion of the population of the entire planet. From a standing start to 1% of WB traffic for one device from one manufacturer, in little over a year, is staggeringly huge.
As in, what proportion of the worlds population own *any* kind of pc? Furthermore the proportion that actually own any kind of *tablet* is several orders of magnitude smaller than that. In other words the proportion of the worlds population that own an iPad is still vanishingly small (although its penetration of the consumer market in "advanced" countries is of course very impressive). On a lighter note if such a small proportion of the world's population (who own an iPad) manage to generate as much as 1% of the total internet traffic on the face of the planet one has to ask whether they have time for anything else in their lives. They must be "on" morning, noon and night. An endless diet of FaceBook, Twitter etc perhaps?
"What *possible* reason could there be for down-voting a statement of the bleedin' obvious like that? Some people here need to get a life...."
More over Geoff, you need to stop worrying if people agree with you or not. Just because *you* say or think something, it doesn't make it right (or necessarily wrong). People will disagree with you and that's OK. I suggest, me ol'china, that you get over yourself.
Considering that Android based mobile devices have been 'in the wild' for considerably less than their Jobsian counterparts, the market share is pretty damn impressive.
Yep, I'm firmly in the Android camp, if only because it's Linux based, more open, more configurable and ... more geeky. There's far less corporate starched stripey shirt douchebaggery going down and far more beard rubbing t-shirt wearing slobby geek demographic (jocks vs nerds)
Lets give it another year and see, my bet is that Android will be neck & neck with iOS with windows mobile at the rear, panting heavily and bellowing a lot.
With Ballmer at the helm, I can't see windows mobile being taken seriously. Short of a massive organisational shift, microsoft will continue to be a bit player in this market.
I will now rub my beard and admire my 32nd pair of new converse 'sneakers' whilst listening to extremely loud and fast metal as I code something brilliant whilst simultaneously reading heavy going geek tomes on my spare Kindle as I install the latest Cyanogenmod on my customised android device.
There used to be a nice bit of graffiti in Liverpool, stencilled on the side of a pub. On one line it read "The average person thinks they are more intelligent than average", and on the next it read "Do you think you are more intelligent than the average person?"
Nice thought provoking bit of text for anybody driving past or travelling on the bus out of Liverpool. Converse paid to have the question sentence spray-painted over with some shitty faux-graffiti tat. I'd never heard of them before, and I've hated them ever since. At least you can find old pictures of it via Google, but after the advert got sandblasted off the text has been ruined and barely readable. Cunts.
http://www.panoramio.com/photo/15933960
Android devices have been on the market for about 75% as long as iOS devices, Android phones outsell iPhones in several major markets, yet they manage only about 50% as much traffic per this article. And that's seemingly discounting the iPod Touch.
My feeling is that because Android is flexible and open, a lot of people are getting Android phones with expensive data plans, and in terms of quantities shipped it's still primarily a phone operating system. So there's no real one versus the other conclusion to be drawn, other than - as I say in my title - claiming pretty impressive market share based on little time in the wild doesn't add up.
I frankly don't believe it. Unless the "world" only includes richer parts of California.
What are they measuring?
if a PC connects to internet all day ant not used for any of the web sites they monitor?
If a iPad connects to same place 20 times because it's snacking a 1 minute at a time, is that 20 iPads.
I call bunkum.
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A little bird told me that there is still sorrow and teeth grinding at El Reg offices because of the ban of the word "lappy" some 5 odd years ago, as you can read here: http://www.theregister.co.uk/2006/03/14/lappy_poll/
So no way their gonna lose fondleslab, a word I truly think describes the almost erotic relationship that every proud owner develops towards his/hers Jobsian tablet gadget.
Terminator? just because of all the BOFH's and the viscosity of time...
Lost in all the noise is the fact that Net Applications also reports that iOS now has 3.65x the worldwide web marketshare of Android with 2.63% vs 0.72%.
The interesting thing is that this represents a 6% increase over last month when the iOS share was 3.4x larger than Android.
Yet another sign that Android's growth is plateauing while iOS just keeps getting bigger.
-Mart
Yet another sign? Weird, all the other signs I've seen have Android passing iOS on the phone platform and accelerating into the distance.
All these figures show is that Apple has moved on from dominating the mobile market, to dominating the tablet market instead. Android is still playing catchup in that market with it's tablet version of the OS only just out the door and restricted to select partners.
@Steve Evans,
Yes, Android is plateauing with the global sales growth rate of Android devices droppiing to 3 percent in the March quarter from 7.5 percent in the fourth quarter and 9.5 percent in the September quarter.
IDC reports that Android's share of the US smartphone market in dropped for the first time from 52.4% in Q4 2010 to 49.5% in Q1 2011, a drop of 2.9 points or 5.5% quarter to quarter. In contrast, the iPhone gained significantly larger share going from 17.2% to 29.5%, an increase of 12.3 points or 42%.
NPD agrees reporting that Android's share of quarterly sales in the US smartphone market shrank 6% quarter-to-quarter in Q1 2011 to 50%. In contrast Apple's iPhone grew 47% to capture 28% of all smartphone sales in the USA.
IDC also reports that Apple had the highest growth of any mobile phone vendor worldwide in Q1 2011 year over year of 115% with second place ZTE growing 45%, Samsung growing 9% and HTC and Moto not even on the chart.
And these figures all include Android tablets because the vast bulk of them also include cellular radios and carrier subscriptions.
In contrast, Apple's figures don't include the iPod touch or iPad (which the analysts should do when comparing operating systems), which when added in show iOS and Android to be neck and neck in quarterly unit sales.
Of course in terms of installed base Apple is far ahead of Android with 200 million iOS devices sold versus only 100 million Android as confirmed by ComScore who reported in April that *active* iOS devices outnumber Android devices by 59% in the USA and by 116% in Europe.
-Mart
As opposed to the iSomethings that hit a plateau some three years ago and have been dropping steadily ever since? You did see that statcounter graph I linked to, right? EIther Android users are a very busy bunch viewing a hell of a lot of pages just to twist a graph in their favour, or the Android platform has far from peaked.
Maybe you'd like another set of graphs?
http://iosnova.com/2011/06/29/iphonevsandroid/
Really, which platform is outselling which is a matter of who you ask. Most people will tell you that Android phones are outselling iPhones. Tablets are only a matter of time. Of course, carry on believing that an OS able to run on many different devices has hit a peak if you like. If it'll make you feel better, it's unlikely that iOS is just going to fade away. Much like the Mac OS in the face of Windows.
And I still think Honeycomb has an awful UI.
Your smartphone blinkers are still on Mr Gale. Both the Statcounter and iosnova graphs only count half of the iOS platform. You just can't accept the fact that iOS is far larger than just the iPhone can you?
If you're going to group devices by operating system then stop conveniently leaving out half of the iOS operating system platform.
If you only want to compare smartphones, then compare Motorola, Samsung, HTC and the Apple iPhone individually against each other. The only reason to group them together by operating system is to compare the App and browsing platforms and if you do that, you HAVE to include all devices that run those operating systems.
Just because Apple has obliterated all competitors of the iPod touch in the mini-tablet market for the last 4 years and all iPad competitors in the last year and a bit in the tablet market doesn't mean you can conveniently ignore those segments when comparing operating system platforms.
-Mart
Only a couple of years ago, iWotsits had 100% more market share than Android. Or infinity times, if you like.
What's more important though, is trends. Also who is collecting the results. Asides Net Application's findings conflicting with sale figures massively, you should take a look at the following graph:
http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_browser-ww-monthly-201006-201106
Now, err, what platform is plataeuing there? What platform is definitely on the rise? It gets even better when you move the graph start all the way back to December 2008. Now, click all of the other platforms like Blackberry, Nokia and such to remove their respective lines. Keep Android, iPhone and iPod on there. Notice the drop, that coincides with the rising in popularity of, oh... which platform? Notice how it's a continuous drop that continues on to this day? Notice what direction the Android line is travelling in, and quite quickly at that?
Aha!
(nice troll by the way, it got a reply from me)
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@Phormic you say: "But...but...but...it's just a big iPod Touch! It's just a fad! My netbook can do so much more! It's just marketing, it just spin, I give it six months tops, it's, it's, IT'S...brain explodes..."
Do you not think that the figures back up the idea that "My netbook can do so much more!", it looks like *all* anybody uses them for is mobile gaming or web browsing - I run Visual studio on my Netbook - it runs like a dog, it's not going to get me laid, but it gets the job done.
Cheapo budget thing, possibly not. A certified device with a 1ghz+ processor, more than likely.
However it has to be said, trying to play most Flash games with a touch screen and no mouse/keyboard can be more infuriating than you think. Fantastic Contraption, I'm looking at you!
Granted there's some really awful sites made entirely in Flash for no good reason. Those sites I navigate away from post-haste. But, Flash games are something of a special case. HTML5 still isn't quite there yet if you want reasonably complex game graphics, though I imagine it will get better. Only real problem is there's some devs out there that need to realise that an increasing number of viewers are only going to have a touch interface.
And it beats downloading an app that wants to know everything about your phone, your location, your contacts and emails just so you can waste five minutes of an Afternoon.
The windroidtard protesting seems to fall neatly into two categories:
1. "No!! It cannot be! The figure is too big, I don't believe it!"
2. "So 99% is using something else, big deal, 1% is completely insignificant."
Put the two together and you'll conclude that the figure must be about right.
The figure isn't "about right". It's exactly right, what with having been measured by traffic volumes an' all. If we were talking about opinions or interpretations, of course there would be room for debate.
The debate now is what 1% actually means. My call? Diddly squat.
Ah, more down-votes. How comforting :-)
GJC
Despite more and more android devices being sold, overtaking iDevices in the phone market, their use on the web is meagre.
I think a big chunk of these android devices being sold are low end phones, whose owners are not using the web (or even apps?)
Therefore when the android fanbois go on about beating apple, they are actually just quoting sales figures for devices in a market that apple currently doesn't compete in (low end phones).
"... in a market that apple currently doesn't compete in (low end phones)."
Perhaps you missed this:
http://www.apple.com/iphone/iphone-3gs/
I'll sum up for you. It is: a $49 iPhone, competing in the low end phone market, perhaps the most brilliant stroke Apple's marketing department has had and far better than changing everything again and again and over and over ad nauseum.
Oh, if the owners aren't using the web or apps, why would they get anything other than a phone? Perhaps the big reason both iPhone and Android are growing is because they have both broken the business market which is unfortunate for RIM's Blackberry.
because with the February dip it looks like people get bored with the ipad. then in march after everyone has been paid and has money in the bank "finally" after the xmas spending spree. they have then gone out and bought into the ipad fad.
you would even be able to map out the Sales to bored ratio :D
i.e. 1 in 2 ipadders get bored after a month of their fan slab.
There's no central database that logs every time you go to 'ipadporn.com'.. the only thing I can imagine them doing is reading the logs of a bunch of websites.
Of course by picking the websites carefully they can say any damned thing they like, depending on who payed for the 'survey'. It's not that long ago we were seeing articles on this very site saying how the corporate world was enamoured with blackberries they'd take over the world...
Next week someone else will release a similar report saying Android has most of the market. The week after Windows Mobile...
@m gale,
As usual, Android boosters only count the iPhone and compare it against all Android phones, tablets and mini tablets as you have done with those Statcounter stats.
However, if you are going to group all those devices together by what operating system they run, then you need to group all iOS devices together - the iPhone plus the iPod touch and the iPad. When you do that you see Statcounter's graph shows the same increasing dominance of the iOS platform that Net Applications shows.
Take the blinkers off, mobile operating systems are bigger than just the small smartphone segment.
Leavingcout half of the iOS platform in your comparisons is as bad as only counting laptops when comparing Windows against Linux and Mac OS X.
-Mart
...I did? Results are the same. Granted I was comparing "Mobile Browser" rather than "Mobile OS" as you suggest, but even when you select OS from the dropdown menu rather than Browsers, and then compare "iOS vs Android" rather than "iPod and iPhone vs Android", the only thing that happens is the same trend shows up in an even MORE pronounced manner. In fact by my somewhat unscientific guesswork, that graph indicates Android will pass ALL iOS devices, globally, in about a month or two from now. Don't forget that while Android has been on tablets for much longer than iOS, these have all been unofficial, hacked-in dodgy versions. Officially, Android hasn't been on tablets for very long at all. Come back next year and we'll see what the usage and sales patterns are.
Blinkers? I'd suggest the same, matey. I'd also suggest using the "reply" button. I have better things to do than hunt through a comments section.
I see from your reply on the same point that we "paralleled" each other! I will admit that although I had the impression that what the graph shows us actually was the case, it was not until I set the display to make precisely that comparison that I realised how stark the contrast actually is. The next couple of years in "tab space" are going to be very interesting. What with hardware development roaring ahead (eg Nvidia's KalEl quad-core offering), the Android os doing gangbusters and seeing what impact Win8 has in the tab market end of 2012/beginning of 2013, it is pretty certain that we are only just seeing the beginning of a *serious* disruption/paradigm shift in the personal computer/mobile communications market. I should also add that although the received "wisdom" here at El Reg says that the upcoming Nokiasoft phones have to be greeted with howls of "Fail", "Nokia's been borged". "Elop is Ballmer's bumboy", "Micro$oft", etc etc it *is* just possible that Nokia may succeed in making positive waves with their "mangoed" WP7 phones. If that happens the market is going to get even more "complicated"! I speak BTW as the happy owner of a Desire Z - I just get fed up with the insistent beat of "Do you wanna be in my gang, my gang, my gang, do wanna be in my........." that we see so much of on some threads. I do not wear anybody's "colours", I just want to read about and discuss tech and sometimes get the impression that that is too much to ask!
...........operating systems. If you go to StatCounter Global Stats at:
http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-ww-monthly-200812-201106
......you can set the graphical comparison to display the various flavours of os. If you set it to display only iOs and Android for the period from Jan 2009 up to the present you will see something very interesting. Whose os is exhibiting a positive slope and whose is exhibiting a negative slope over this time period taken as a whole? I'll give you a clue - you will not like what the graph shows you.
Here is a graph of web share of all iOS devices vs all Android devices over the last 10 months:
http://www.netmarketshare.com/operating-system-market-share.aspx?qprid=9&qpcustom=iOS,Android,Linux&sample=29
As you can see, iOS is currently at 2.63% which is 3.65x greater than Android at 0.72%
A month earlier, iOS was at 2.38% vs 0.76% for Android which was only 3.13x as larger than Android.
Notice that Android has actually lost 0.04 marketshare points. Android has dropped 5%, while iOS has increased its share 10%.
The StatCounter graphs you are so fond of quoting are not counting all iOS devices. However, Net Applications is comparing all devices when it compares operating systems (as it should).
Again, you need to take off the smartphone blinkers. Both Android and iOS run on tablets, mini-tablets and smartphones and the vast majority of apps run on all of them (most iPad apps are universal and thus also run on iPod touches and iPhones and of course smartphone apps are almost all that is available for Android tablets).
However, when all is said an done, both of these web metrics firms are only counting web page visitors. The most accurate data comes from the likes of NPD, IDC and ComScore who actually count unit sales and do surveys of end users and all of these analytical firms confirm that Android has lost around 6% marketshare sequentially in the USA in the last month while the iPhone has surged by 40%. Likewise ComScore reports that the number of active iOS devices outnumber Android devices in the USA by 59% and in Europe by 116%. See my post on the previous page for more detail of these stats.
Face it, the days of Android's rapid ascension are behind it - Android has now plateaued and even lost share in some segments.
-Mart
If it's by sniffing the User Agent from the header, they are likely to be under reporting more configurable mobile devices. For example my mobile browser currently reports itself as:
mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; Intel Mac OS X 10_6_3; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.16 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0 Safari/533.16
It's not easy to tell from that string that I'm running a standard Android browser with the "mobile view" toggled off, and I suspect it will be recorded as a hit from a Safari browser on the Mac.
That's before you muddy the water further by those mobile devices that allow you to install other browsers i.e. Mobile Opera etc.
Just looked at the stats for one of my sites. It lists iPhone rather than iOS - and it shows at this moment that in the last 24 hours 2.08% visitors were using a iphone/pad whereas only 0.45% were on Android.
Android's figures have barely changed over the last month and I don't recollect it ever passing 0.5%. iOS fluctuates between 2.0 and 2.2% and hasn't been below 2% for a while now.
Not scientific I know - but...
BULLSHIT!!!
I call bullshit on this graphic and its data.
I do not believe that HP/PALM have simply disappeared from the market.
They had 3-10% of market in recent studies... now they are less than .01%?
Bullshit, not buying it article is total fail and CANT be based on FACT.
Not to mention all the very MOBILE toshiba, etc netbooks that are clearly used for web browsing more than any other use.
Mobile Toshibas just like MacBook Airs run big grown up browsers, not mobile browsers, so their idents are indistinguishable from desktop computers. Thus these graphs do not include them - but not for any evil reason, they just can't distinguish them.
As for HP/Palm, they're pretty much screwed in the US these days - they may have 3% of the existing US smartphone base but the people who own them are people who just don't care about smartphones - they're not being used much for browsing and they have sales so low that Nielsen don't even bother giving them a line on the graph.
WebOS is currently an ex-parrot.
A large percentage of Android phones run with a different user agent than Android. I currently switch between being viewed as an iPhone, a Windows PC and a Mac OS-X PC. This is a large percentage of the Android community since the option comes stock on many Android phones.
We need an Android icon.
Honestly, more web browsing is probably happening on Netscape 7, Konqueror, SeaMonkey, Camino, Safari for Windows, or Lynx than on the iCult's devices.
Im really sick to death of the "Tablets will rule the world" claptrap almost as much as Im sick of people referring to overpriced distributed co-location storage and grid computing services with absolutely unacceptable Service Level Agreements as the mysterious sounding "Cloud" and how this "Cloud" will make the traditional PC obsolete. Well the "cloud" is the internet, and the internet aint exactly safe nor is it completely reliable. These "cloud" marketing types never have a good answer to that one.
As ive said in previous posts, Tablets have some very limited useful applications, we (the US Army) used them in Iraq for "Blue Force" tracking and secure email for dismounted troops that would have found a traditional laptop extremely cumbersome, they're also great in healthcare (esp. hospitals) for the same reason, but for the most part, they're just shiny toys for rich people to show off.
But seriously guys, was it a slow news day in the IT world? I mean come on, a story about how a niche product has 1% browser market share? Really?
Yes, I'm posting here on an iPad as we speak. The bigger truth is that overall web browsing on slabs won't go up tremendously until god damn 4G arrives. 3G is painful while on the move at the best of times.
People forget the Android category is becoming a flooded Market with every manufacturer jumping on the bandwagon. You'd think that would jump past iOS? Nope. I'm more interested in RIM and MSs progression. The nonplaybook? It's being touted as the king of flash enabled devices. More p0rn for them and keeping that industry alive for a little longer.
1) Watch in amazement as your device searched Google for the wrong thing because it's "suggestion box" thinks it knows better than you what you wish to search for and infers from a LACK of confirmation on the users part to signal acceptance of it's erroneous suggestion.
1 in 3 searches performed on my partners iPad are to re-do the search using the term I/we ACTUALLY wanted to search for, NOT what the device decided we wanted to search for.
2) Be astonished as you "Open in a New Page" a link that you wish to read later, but your device decides you want to read NOW. So you switch back to the original page that you ACTUALLY want to READ, and the device decides that it should RELOAD that page, just in case it changed since you clicked thru that link.
Then the time comes to read the page you opened via that link, so you jab-jab-jab to "navigate" ("stumble in a needlessly hobbled fashion" would be nearer the mark) to that page, start reading but then... NO.. WAIT... your Jobslab decided you should reload THAT page too.
I'd estimate that 1 in 3 page loads on my partners iPhone/iPad browser are the result of entirely unnecessary RELOADs of pages that have already been loaded.
In other words, only 1 in 3 of the page loads are what we actually want - the rest is repetitive or erroneous noise. So to be accurate you should probably slash that 2% to 0.6%. Suddenly things don't look as impressive now, do they?
It's quite easy to see how the Jobslab has "grabbed" this %'age of web traffic.... that's literally what it does: While every other browser is doing it's level best to streamline the user experience and minimise unnecessary network round trips, the Jobslab browser goes out of it's way to sacrifice user experience to inflate it's own stats.
(which is, luckily, not that easily captured):
(Spending ability) X (browsing habits). So even if platform A gives me 50% more hits than B, but on an avg a B user is 200% more likely to spend a penny on my website, I would "tune" my website for "B" rather than "A".
Thanks privacy gods, the last of them.
What is iPad/iPhone browsing figure as a % of total web use?
If one assumes most apple devices use safari and many iPad/iPhone users will also have a desktop/laptop then their preferred browsing device will surely be the one with a larger screen, full size keyboard and mouse reserving the poorer iPad/iPhone experience for when the alternative is unavailable. And I guess there are a fair number of apple laptop/desktop users who don't also have iPad/iPhone. Netmarket share says 7.4% of web use is through safari (primarily apple users but also web developers using WinSafari to check sites work OK).
I find it hard to believe that as many 1 in 7 web accesses via Safari are iPad/iPhone.
And Statcounter puts Safari share at 5% so why is netmarket reporting 50% higher? One or both must be wrong.
My personal experience is that, on smartphones of any variety, browsing standard web sites is a PITA. Only really worth bothering when there's a mobile version of the website.
I'm sure there must be some distorting factors out there like webmail vs email client usage. I guess webmail counts as "web access" whereas a non-web email client is internet access but not web. Similarly mobile mapping Apps need not be "web" but constitute internet accesses. I use email and mapping apps much more than browser on mobile.
Microsoft's IE Countdown site still shows IE6 at over 10% of web usage - ten times as much as iPad.
Amazon, Google, 37signals and Wordpress have all dropped (or announced imminent plans to drop) support for IE6.
So if a platform with 10% of the market is one major organisations can disregard, how much effort should be expended to ensure compatibility with a platform representing only 1%?
One might even argue that Adobe have dropped support for the iPad... even if not from choice. An acknowledgement by Apple that the iPad is not able to support the de-facto internet standard of Flash perhaps?
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