Sam Oliver
Even as Google counts some 1 billon monthly active users for Android worldwide, more than six out of every ten page views from a mobile device in the U.S. still come from an iPhone, an iPad, or an iPod touch, according to new browsing data released on Monday.
Apple's share of the U.S. mobile browsing market is off just 4.1 percentage points from its high last July — down from 64.4 percent to 60.3 percent — and is nearly flat year-over-year. Google's Android, meanwhile, ticked up by 4.5 percentage points to 33.4 percent over the same period.
The data was collected by audience measurement firm Quantcast and released in a Monday afternoon note to investors from Pipar Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, a copy of which was provided to AppleInsider. Quantcast sampled around 1 billion mobile page views to arrive at the share data, which Munster equates to approximately 1.5 percent of the viewing market.
Munster put forward a number of hypotheses for iOS's continued superiority, beginning with the iPhone's position as the most popular smartphone at major wireless carriers AT&T and Verizon. He also believes that iOS users are likely to be "more engaged with their phones on a daily basis" than their Android counterparts and that the iPad contributes a proportionally larger amount of traffic than Android tablets.
As they battle between themselves, Apple and Google are also slowly pushing out other operating systems. Though the data was not broken out in detail, it is likely that much of the 4.6-percentage point drop over the last year can be attributed to lackluster sales of Windows Phone-based devices and handsets from beleaguered Canadian smartphone maker BlackBerry.
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41 Comments
One billion Android smartphones is worldwide while the quoted browsing figures are US only. It confuses some readers when both markets are mixed in an apples-oranges comparison within the same article, even within the same sentence. EDIT: Nice to see the author make a change to the first sentence. It's now a little clearer. Kudos!
It just means the average android user has yet to figure out what a smart phone is.
Also, as pointed out 1B devices world wide most of which do not have the ability to surf the web.
I have said this before, Android was a vehicle to provide mobile ad revenues for google, and as we keep seeing, it is not going it job even with it massive installed based.
They are literally giving-away Android junk phones. As far as I'm concerned, it's just market-dumping.
What I find hard to understand is why the Android fanboys just flat-out refuse to believe studies like these. Most consumers for Android devices are cost-concious, folks that most likely have limited phone plans. I certainly believe - from my own personal experience only - that many Android users are just so technically inept, they use their Android phones really as a glorified feature phones. They really have no clue. To them, the Internet is really a giant cloud of unknown.
This is news?
It doesn't matter if it's US or worldwide or whether you're tracking browsing/internet traffic, online sales, App revenue or downloads, digital content sales (music, TV, movies) or even ad revenue - iOS always comes out on top, in some case by a LOT (2X App revenue, 6X digital content revenue).
All those Android devices must be getting used for something. Just not the normal things people would do with a "smartphone".
[quote name="Maestro64" url="/t/181245/apples-ios-continues-to-dominate-mobile-web-browsing-as-android-gains#post_2560531"]It just means the average android user has yet to figure out what a smart phone is. Also, as pointed out 1B devices world wide most of which do not have the ability to surf the web. [/quote] Why would most Android phones not have the capability of using the web?