Akamai: Mobile Safari was dominant mobile browser in Q3 2012, trailed Android's cellular data share - Page 2

 

While I share your disdain of using limited web or advertising stats to determine actual device usage, especially from companies who are only seeking to sell their wares, Akamai is not the only study to say that phone usage is the same.

 

For example, take that recent Chitika study from December, which was widely quoted on fansites.   From it, most people only saw headlines like "iOS Devices consume twice as much web traffic as Android!".   Few ever took the time to actually read further down in the source material:

 

"While third-party and our own observations have pegged smartphone Web traffic share as a near-tie, Apple has a decided advantage in the tablet market, where its iPad is unquestionably the hottest seller in the sector.  This advantage is the largest contributing factor to Apple’s lead over Android." - Chitika

 

The upshot seems to be that, at least in the USA, mobile web browsing is done two to three times as much on large screened tablets than on phones or e-readers, and there's a lot more large screened iPads in the USA than any other large screened tablet.

 

Edited by KDarling - 1/29/13 at 8:03am

No, pretty much every website stat tracking shows the same thing, iOS usage is greater than Android usage, by how much depends on the content. Image/comic sites tend to be consistent with Akamai's numbers, where as sites that cater specifically to Apple fans (eg Appleinsider, Macrumors) versus Linux/Android (Slashdot) tend to skew much more heavily to their intended audiences devices.

See also
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_mobile.asp iOS >Android
http://www.w3counter.com/globalstats.php iOS>Android
http://www.netmarketshare.com/# iOS>Android

The stats don't lie, but as pointed out, English-language traffic is largely going to reflect this. When you look at Asian language traffic you'll probably see a different set of numbers, particularly with Korea.

 

Android e-readers? What Android e-readers would that be? I wan't aware there were any Android e-readers. I mean, Amazon has some e-readers, but they aren't Android, same for B&N. Who is selling these Android e-readers?

I guess that if the stats were broken down by device class (phone, tablet, music player), iOS would be at a disadvantage, since the majority of iOS' web access access is done on the iPad, which very few people use extensively through cellular networks. I actually like to see the stats broken down this way.

I think trailed is a bit of a strong word, doesn't look much in it to me.

I think you are by far the exception and not the rule. I have cable internet at home and usually get about 22 Mbps; however, my iPhone 5 will routinely get 30 + Mbps and has gotten as high as 48 Mbps according to speedtest.  Most public wifi is horrible and many people still have DSL at home with speeds ranging around 6-9 Mbps.  If you live in an area with good LTE reception, you are very likely to get much better speeds than on most wifi networks.

I see everyone missed my point.

 

Akamai can't separate out devices. Which makes me think their analytics software isn;t that great. And if they can;t perform such a simple task as grouping data use by device, then I don;t see why I should trust anything they say. They probably still get fooled by the Android User Agent setting like we're back in 2009.

 

On my website I know how many iPad, iPhone, GS3, Galaxy Nexus, Nexus 4, Nexus 10 and even Nokia 920 users have visited. I've even had a few Symbian users drop by. On my site about 70% of the mobile visitors are using iPads or iPhones (with an almost equal split between them). The other 30% is everyone else.

 

Another example, when IBM did their Black Friday holiday shopping study they found almost 90% of purchases made by tablets were from the iPad. In that study they were able to provide the devices used (Galaxy, Nook, Kindle, Other). Not the broswer or OS but the DEVICE USED.

 

 

This data is USELESS if they can't break it down by device.

Tablets! Apple still has the largest majority of Tablets out there and I believe most such users connect to the Internet via WiFi rather than Cellular.

Eric, where did you read that their collected data can't identify specific device types?

 

This is exactly the case. A lot of Android users own iPads (minis and regular) but don't carry them with them everywhere they go. And regardless of who you are, surfing the net on an iPhone or any other mobile phone sucks compared to using a tablet, iPhone, Android, or otherwise.

 

It's 2013 and we're still iPhone vs Android (it should be iOS vs Android, but I digress) trolling when it's clear that these two OSs will forever be neck and neck with no clear "winner" until iPads finally put most consumer laptops to misery, only to have those old laptop manufactures get behind Android in order to survive. In the end, consumers are winning because iOS devices are getting cheaper and Android manufactures are driving prices down with legitimate and comparable alternatives.

I think there is one huge thing that people are missing. Almost everybody I know with an android phone turns wi-fi off since it "drains the battery," according to them.

The device has to constantly scan for networks, so yes it does use up battery.

Unfortunately, Akamai's stats are misleading. They don't properly identify Chrome for Android (and iOS) or Firefox for Android. They're counting Chrome for Android and iOS as desktop Chrome, and Firefox for Android as desktop Firefox. This was confirmed to me by an email from Akamai in December 2012.

 

Also, their stats don't rollup browsers based on OS. Lots of folks look at the "iOS vs Android" graph, see that the iOS line is higher and draw bad conclusions. The "Android" line isn't showing all Android browsers, just the stock Browser app, which isn't even installed on some newer devices. I've contacted Akamai about this issue as well, and they claim they'll add the feature in the future.