According to the latest report from Net Applications (via All Things D), Apple's Safari continues to be the top mobile browser.
Safari for iOS was responsible for 61.79% of total mobile internet traffic during the month of March, an increase from 55.41% in February. Safari's closest competitor for mobile browser dominance was Google's Android browser, which had a 21.86% share of Web traffic in March.
Opera Mini came in third with 8.4%, Chrome registered 2.43%, and Microsoft Internet Explorer was the final major contender, with 1.99%.
Net Applications includes traffic from both smartphones and tablets, and the data that it collects comes from more than 160 million visits to 40,000 websites each month.
Top Rated Comments
zzz...
zzzzzz.....
ZZZZZZZZ . . . . . . . . .
----------
I don't find it impressive...I think that most of us that use logic and our brains know that Apple is the dominant device by a huge margin out there.
Only the fandroids and Samsung paid media are touting that Apple was doomed and loosing rapid market share.
Surprising, I agree--but it's an old surprise: data from every source has pointed in this same direction for ages. So why aren't Android users going online as much? I see at least three likely contributing factors--bearing in mind that we tech-savvy forum-goers are not the public at large:
1. People do NOT always buy Android phones to use them. A certain chunk of people take whatever free or cheap phone the carrier salesperson can push on them, with whatever data plan they can be talked into, and really don't know what they're getting or why. They proceed to keep making phone calls and not much else, which was all they ever did before.
2. Some Android phones are just awful. There are hundreds of them that are not well-known poster devices, just junk shoveled out the door with a free OS. My friend was excited to get a free smartphone with browser and email... but discovered that she hates it. She does use it anyway, but surprisingly little. Can't wait for an iPhone next time.
3. Even at its best, the Android experience as a whole is not as good as the iOS experience. Fewer apps, more malware, more mysterious battery drain, less careful UI, more confusion, more outdated software rather than receiving the latest OS version. And human nature means that if something doesn't work quite as well, you naturally won't use it quite as much. By analogy, compare two apps for the same phone--weather apps, say. One works better than the other; users of that app will use it more! Same applies to entire phones/OS's.
I would suspect you are in a SMALL minority of iDevice users using an alternate browser. The average Joe is going to use the default Safari.
The data is impressive in that iDevice users generate more traffic per device than all other mobile devices COMBINED.
"The lack of innovation is making Android a better option than the iPhone"
I'm not saying anything about the two major competitors, I just want to point out that Safari having such an advantage means that iOS devices are being used a lot more than Android devices, regardless of any sales figures, profits, market share, etc Which means, quite obviously, that iOS is not doing bad at all compared to everything out there. People still prefer browsing the web (which is the most significant thing you do on a smartphone/tablet) on iOS, for some reason