iOS' Safari Remains Leading Mobile Browser

[Solandri]

[citation][nom]ericburnby[/nom]Yet another result that shows more people on iOS use the internet than users on Android despite Android having a larger installed base.

How many more studies from various companies have to be done before the haters realize what's going on here?[/citation]
It took me a while to figure out what's going on. Net Applications normalizes its web stats for unique visitors. If someone visits a website 30x in a month (once a day), they only count as one visitor - exactly the same as someone who visits a website once a month. So roughly 2.5x as many iOS users browse the web as Android users (down from 4x).

The picture looks very different if you don't normalize for unique visitors. Statcounter draws its stats from 3 million websites (vs. about 40,000 for Net Applications), and does not normalize for unique visitors. They count raw number of website visits.
http/gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_browser-ww-monthly-201111-201211

Android passed iOS back around the beginning of the year and has been steadily pulling ahead. In other words, despite having only about 1/3rd the number of users browsing the web as iOS, that smaller number of Android users do more web browsing than all iOS users combined.

So what's going on is that the iOS users are the kind who'll occasionally browse the web on their phone or tablet. A large portion of Android users don't browse the web at all, but the small portion who do do it a lot. So much that they do more browsing than all iOS users combined. So most of your heavy power users and people using their devices as an alternative to a computer are on Android. Most of your luddite users who just want a smartphone for the non-web features are on Android. iOS is stuck in between with mostly luddite users who occasionally browse the web.

 

[Vladislaus]

[citation][nom]ericburnby[/nom]Yet another result that shows more people on iOS use the internet than users on Android despite Android having a larger installed base.How many more studies from various companies have to be done before the haters realize what's going on here?[/citation]
NetMarketShare puts Safari ahead but for example Statscounter puts Android browser ahead.

 

[Vladislaus]

[citation][nom]ericburnby[/nom]Bull. Every single person I know with an iPhone or iPad also owns a computer, most of them Windows PC's.NDC released their data for Black Friday today. Android tablets saw a 177% increase from last year, but average price went from $219 to $151. Imagine that, the average price for an Android tablet is $151.All this data points to the same conclusion. For every higher end Android tablet or phone sold there are a bunch of low-end devices that people don't even use. Today there are numerous Android phones available in the US with tiny 320x240 screens running Android 2.3. You think those users browse the Internet?I don't know why Android users seem to think everyone owns a GS3 or similar device. The minority of Android devices sold are low end phones that people use as feature phones.[/citation]
Funny because the Galaxy S3 is the most popular Android phone, followed by the Optimus G.

 

[everygamer]

These statistics are slightly skewed because iOS generally launches Safari based on prompts from applications and actions by users where native apps do not exist.

Of the 3 most accessed sites on the internet (#1 Google, #2 Facebook & #3 YouTube) iOS only has a native app for one of them (Facebook). All other traffic to these sites is via Safari.

On Android Google Search is integrated into most of its applications, so searching on Google is not done in a browser most of the time. Facebook has an app. YouTube has an app. So the top 3 sites are not accessed via the browser. This alone would decrease the total impressions from the Android mobile browsers. Android also learns from your actions, so if you get an email with a youtube link, and you click on it, it will auto-launch the youtube app and not just go to the mobile browser.

So is this really an example of iOS Safari dominance ... or just an example of how the two platforms work. iOS drives more users to the web, Android brings the web into its platform/apps.

 

[everygamer]

The problem with this evaluation is it is not taking into account the differences between iOS and Android. There is a fundamental difference. Android integrates search into all of its native applications (Google Live, Google Maps, Google Search, etc). They have integrated it deeply into its API so that search is fairly pervasive in other applications. So users on Android do not need to launch a browser to get to their data, where as iOS tends to direct their users into Safari for those resources (especially when people want to search Google). Where iOS does pull from Google in combined application searches, it is usually going through a webkit call which looks like Safari to the stat counters.

On top of Google.com traffic, there is also YouTube traffic, on Android they have a native application, and that application will be launched if someone clicks on a YouTube link in an email, facebook post (app), twitter feed (app), etc.

The reason why this is significant is that the top 3 visited sites on the internet, that drive the most traffic through browsers are #1 Google, #2 Facebook and #3 YouTube. This is both in the US and Globally.

So when you take this into account, iOS not having a native YouTube app, nor having Google integration means those 2 sites need to be accessed via Safari.

Android on the other hand doesn't need its browser for the majority of actions on any of those sites, thus most of that traffic is not going to be on the stat collector sites.

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Now on to the stat counters.

NetMarketShare
- Collects data from 40,000 web sites
- Only counts 1 unique IP per day per site.

StatCounter
- 3 million websites
- Collects total impressions (total clicks)

They fundamentally look at the data differently. NetMarketShare is looking at unique browser/user combinations.

StatCounter is looking at which browser is hitting sites harder, generating more traffic.

Neither of these solutions is at all useful, because apps on both iOS and Android skew this data because in the mobile platform traffic divided between browser/apps. Desktops this is not really an issue, people don't have a facebook app, or youtube app on a desktop (though that is starting to change with Windows 8's App Store), so they can do more oranges to oranges comparison on desktops. Unless they can get traffic statistics from mobile apps they are working with incomplete data to make a comparison.

Considering worldwide Android holds 72% of the market share, it's a little hard to believe that android users make less use of the internet. It makes more sense that they are using the internet just as much as any other user, it's just that they are doing it via a different method not in the data collection ... apps versus browser.