AppleInsider Staff
The 65.27 percent share of Apple's iOS platform, which is found on the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch, was up from 62.65 percent in May. Apple's share has steadily risen, growing from a 53 percent position in August of 2011.
Apple's next closest competitor in mobile browsing market is Google's Android platform, which took 19.73 percent in the month of June. Android has also seen its share grow since last August, when it took 15.98 percent of mobile browsers.
The gains for iOS and Android have been losses for Research in Motion's BlackBerry and Nokia's Symbian platforms. BlackBerry has fallen from 3.33 percent in August of 2011 to 1.87 percent in June, while Symbian has dropped from 6.21 percent last August to 1.49 percent in June.
The latest desktop market data from Net Applications also tracks Apple's Mac OS X share at 6.7 percent of computers browsing the Web. Windows has a dominant 92.2 percent of computers tracked online, while Linux accounts for 1.1 percent.
Among specific browser software, Apple's Safari was tracked with 4.7 percent of the market, well behind Google's Chrome (19.1 percent), Mozilla Firefox (20.1 percent), and Microsoft's Internet Explorer (54 percent).
Amber Neely
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37 Comments
As a mobile OS, iOS has majority share to begin with. It's on iPhones, iPods, iPads.
53% to 65.7% in 6 months? That's a lot of growth and huge percentage for an OS that pro-Android/anti-Apple people think isn't possible when Google posts the latest activation numbers. How much evidence do people need to see that most Android-based devices are not being used as tools for accessing the internet? Android OS is the new feature phone OS, not the new smartphone OS.
[quote name="Quadra 610" url="/t/151036/apples-ios-takes-65-mobile-browser-share-in-june-android-at-20#post_2138364"]As a mobile OS, iOS has majority share to begin with. It's on iPhones, iPods, iPads. [/quote] But Android OS is on PMPs, tablets, handsets, PCs, eReaders, smartwatches, cordless phones, handheld game consoles, portable radios, set-top TV boxes, and other odd device categories.
53% to 65.7% in 6 months? That's a lot of growth and huge percentage for an OS that pro-Android/anti-Apple people think isn't possible when Google posts the latest activation numbers. How much evidence do people need to see that most Android-based devices are not being used as tools for accessing the internet? Android OS is the new feature phone OS, not the new smartphone OS.
These numbers, once again, also cast serious doubt on the "activation numbers" that Google claims (As well as their relevance, as you point out. I did say a couple of years ago that Android was to be the new "feature phone" OS, which seems could be the case.) Essentially, Google has a (yet another) credibility problem, since what should be the corroborating evidence, doesn't corroborate the story they tell about the growth of the platform.
In any case, this is yet another strike against Android for developers considering whether it's worth investing some of their finite resources in the platform.
[quote name="anonymouse" url="/t/151036/apples-ios-takes-65-mobile-browser-share-in-june-android-at-20#post_2138377"]In any case, this is yet another strike against Android for developers considering whether it's worth investing some of their finite resources in the platform. [/quote] At 20% of a very large and fast growing combination of market segments it does seem viable, but developers do have to consider the tools for each platform, the number of device types for each platform (vis-à-vis cost and time), and the likelihood of customer's paying for your app (which also includes payouts from ad support). When you factor all that in Android still looks profitable but iOS looks many times more viable than what these simple netstats show.