Net Applications mobile browsing statistics: iPhone 66% share
Monitoring web traffic is a dicey thing, and sometimes it’s hard to determine if traffic statistics are meaningful. Traffic monitor Net Applications has released their mobile web traffic numbers for February, and they are surprising to say the least.
It’s pretty much a given that iPhone owners do a lot of web browsing on their phones — the iPhone is designed for that. Knowing that going in still doesn’t prepare me for the statistic showing that iPhone web browsing accounts for 66% of all mobile web browsing. That’s just a huge share and I’m not sure what to make of it. Equally surprising is that the G1 Android phone has already gained a 6% share, matching that of Symbian-based phones. While it’s no surprise that the BlackBerry browsing share is low, I expected it to be more than the 2.24% that is showing here.
After using my own Storm over the weekend: I’m not surprised.
The iPhone smokes the Storm at web browsing.
The other item, apps bought since Friday: iPhone 4, Storm 0.
Apple makes apps easy to find, easy to buy, easy to install and easy to get rid of.
I was stunned this morning when I grabbed the WSJ app for the Storm off your posting about “Must Have Apps”. Then when I launched it the app told me it was out of date and offered to download the new version. Then after grabbing that it told me I’d have to reboot the Storm to finish installing! Reboot? I literally did a double take to make sure I wasn’t holding the Fuze in my hands.
I’m not very impressed so far with the progress since my last Blackberry, a 7130e.
And of course: why is the battery in the Storm removable? Because you need to in order to make it work again. I’ve already had the battery out twice to get things like the Internet to work again.
The Android/G1 figure surprises me a bit, but the iPhone number doesn’t shock one one bit. The amount of mobile surfing for me has probably increased by a factor of 10 since I went from a Treo 700p (PalmOS) to the iPhone 3G.
I would like to know, though, how they measured this. Does the iPhone share of 66% reflect the number of pages accessed, the number of bytes transferred, the number of unique visitors, …?
It has to be page views or data transferred. There is no way they have 66% of mobile Internet users. Opera Mini alone has over 20 million monthly users, which exceeds the install base of the iphone.
If you look carefully at their website, they bury the information that this doesn’t include WAP. Which may not bother those of us in 3G land, but WAP phone usage is huge in China and Africa.
So it is by no means a “world” view.
And the bits that say HOW they collect the data is bizarre. Is it from site clickthroughs?
Without doubt net usage is far greater on an iPhone that any other, but there are simply not enough handsets to make THAT much difference in the whole world.
I’d guestimate that the average web page I access on my iPhone is about 10-100x larger (in bytes) than the average WAP page (well, okay, I haven’t used WAP in about 8 years, so maybe I don’t know what I am talking about).
I am always suspicious about the validity and accuracy of any of these statistics. I just can’t think of a reliable way to gather these stats.