Monday 30 July 2012

Mobile Browser Market share: A market stall?


I am a big fan and regular reader of PPK's Quirks Mode website and blog. Recently, PPK completed his second part of his mobile browser market share analysis and I thought I would share some of the highlights of his report. 

To start things off, I thought that I should include a quick snap-shot of global market share of mobile browsers. As you can see, Opera, Android and iPhone are the top three contenders with Nokia rapidly losing ground.


PPK has done some further work here and has broken down the growth and change of the top countries with the following table.


# = number of browsers with 5% or more market share
CountryMobile sharechTop browser#VolatilityTies
Nigeria58%-2Opera35%
India47%+7Opera58%
South Korea21%-2Android23%
Indonesia20%0Opera35%
UK11%+1Safari32%
US9%0Safari23%
Netherlands6%+1Tie22%Safari, Android
Mexico5%0Tie48%Safari, Android, Opera
China4%0UC311%
Egypt4%0Tie48%Opera, Nokia
Brazil3%-1Opera415%
Poland3%0Opera43%

In addition, I have slightly abbreviated one of PPK's tables to demonstrate the growth in the mobile market on a global basis.
The interesting thing here, is that growth of the mobile market is appearing to stall (with Nigeria, South Korea and Brazil losing ground). I guess we may want to start asking the following questions;
  • Is global mobile growth starting to slow?
  • If so, why?
  • Will cheaper smartphones be the solution, or do we need cheaper data plans, or both?
  • If growth picks up again, will it be at a much reduced pace?
You can find the country by country break-down of these reports at PPK's blog here: 




Note: PPK references and data rely on Statcounter (Global Stats) located at gs.statcounter.com. So, caveat emptor: that said, I use their metric and have a measure of trust in their results.


References

Quirks Mode Blog

No comments: