This map shows the popularity of different mobile browsing platforms country by country, with some interesting results.
Apple’s dominance can clearly be seen, with the iPhone and iTouch accounting for over half the market in the US, Canada, UK, France, Germany and Japan.
The Android platform has its largest share in the US and the UK, but has a much weaker share in other countries. This could change in the near future as new phones emerge that run Android, such as the Nexus One.
Docomo and KDDI are the largest mobile phone operators in Japan, and account for 12% of the mobile browser share platforms.
Canada seems to like the iPhone and iTouch, with 86% of mobile internet users using this platform to access the internet.
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February 8th, 2010 at 4:01 pm
Nice post Dom, great graphic.
February 8th, 2010 at 6:37 pm
I had a look at a research on 09 mobile browser market share and I was really surprised to see that the PSP was so popular. Apparently Sony handheld console is still used as a browser in Canada… Why is that?
2010 will be an Android year as every month new Android enabled phones are revealed (check the Mobile World Congress next week…) and Steve Jobs’ last week comments seem to prove his irritation about Google’s moves into the mobile industry.
March 5th, 2010 at 12:03 am
Surely these stats are not describing popularity of browser platforms!
Those stats cannot be correct as presented because:
1) Japan has nearly every mobile phone web enabled. In fact, web usage via mobile handsets in Japan outnumbers PC use–this has been statistically true for a decade.
2) Canada is the home of RIMs BlackBerry. Take a look around here and one can quickly tell (even though this is anecdotal evidence, one can easily see at LEAST a 20-1 BlackBerry to iPhone ratio here in Canada). While iPhone adoption is gaining, it is nowhere near the penetration that BlackBerry has. In fact, iPhone was only available on a single carrier (Rogers) since it was released up until 3 or so months ago.
My guess is that the author/designer has misinterpreted these figures completely (and in the case of Canada’s lack of Berry stats, totally left out accurate figures!).
Where a figure exists, I believe these percentages point more towards the typical amount of bandwidth USED by mobile platform overall, rather than popularity. C’mon, guys!
Nels
March 5th, 2010 at 12:26 am
This looks like yet another flawed mobile marketshare study. Without knowing the methodology, there’s no way to gauge the accuracy.
March 5th, 2010 at 10:36 am
Hi Nels,
Thanks for your comment. The data is taken from http://gs.statcounter.com, which analyses over 5 billion hits per month, inlcuding 160 million for Canada alone. From their site…:
‘Statcounter is a web analytics service. As of 1 August 2009, our tracking code is installed on approximately 3 million sites globally. (These sites cover various activities and geographic locations.) Every month, we record billions of hits to these sites. For each hit, we analyse the browser/operating system used and we summarize this data’
Thanks
Dom
March 5th, 2010 at 11:56 am
Data from statscounter very useful, thanks for highlighting. I am assuming that the prominance of Opera in Africa might be linked to the higher cost of data, narrower bandwidth and smaller RAM of typical handsets? Opera does compression better and has a smaller footprint than most no?
March 9th, 2010 at 11:24 am
Hi Dominic
would like to know if these 3 million sites include WAP based sites and others like Docomo’s i-Mode or iHTML in Japan.
March 9th, 2010 at 11:38 am
Hi Rob, thanks for your comment
I don’t believe it includes WAP sites as it’s impossible to put a Statcounter tracking tag, as well as most other analytics tags, within the WAP code.
I’m unsure however of iHtml or i-Mode, my advice would be to email globalstats@statcounter.com, they may be able to help you.
Thanks
Dom