Where are the Android users?

Where are the Android users?:
Google occasionally reports data regarding Android. Very occasionally. The last time we had some data was in September 2012 when we learned that activations were running at 1.3 million per day and that a total of 500 million total activations had taken place.
As of today, being March 2013, the time between updates has reached five months. It’s the longest gap so far. Benedict Evans also notes that it’s been five months since the data regarding screen size stats has been updated on the Android developer site.
But we have to live with what we get and, in the absence of an update, the pattern of growth in Android, if sustained, looks like this:

It implies that 800 million Android activations have taken place to date and the rate is about 2 million per day. One billion activations could thus happen by June.
There is however another set of data regarding Android which is updated more frequently. The comScore mobiLens survey covers the US and provides updates on a monthly basis. That data shows that Android users in the US reached about 68 million as of the end of January. See the updated data below:

I included the install base and share of total users as reported. Combining the comScore data with Google’s activations gives the following picture of US as a percent of global Android (orange circles represent US base and blue circles the precent of total activations that the US might represent)[1].

The data implies about 9% of Android usage is in the US. The more startling thing is the difference in growth: it implies that with a US growth rate of only about 13.3k/day, global growth is 150 times faster than US growth. In other words, that 0.6% of new users are in the US and that 99.4% of Android growth is outside the US.
That’s an interesting story. But it’s even more interesting that this is not the case with the iPhone. The iPhone is growing considerably faster in the US than Android. One can see this more easily with a graph of the US mobile platform net user gain rate as shown below:


Looking at the the same contrast between global and US, from Apple’s financial reports, in the fourth quarter the global “activation rate” (i.e. sales rate) for iPhone was 525k/day (nearly one quarter of the extrapolated Android rate). The comScore data suggests the US gains are running at 106k/day. Therefore we can calculate that about 20% of iPhone growth is in the US and 80% is outside the US.
Even accounting for some potential error in the Android estimates, the contrast is quite stunning: 1% vs. 20% share of growth suggests something is very different about the US with respect to the two platforms.
My suspicion is that it has something to do with the fact that the US is one of the few (but largest) market where the iPhone is available as a “low end” offering. At a minimum price of $0 (with a contract) many consumers are finding the iPhone attractive relative to a $0 (with a contract) Android phone. This price parity (illusory as it may be) allows iPhone to grow even faster than Android in this particular market.
One wonders what would happen if such price parity were present globally.
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Notes:

1. Android activation data as reported by Google includes tablets but excludes many unofficial Android builds e.g. Amazon Kindle and many Chinese phones and tablets that don’t register with Google services. comScore data includes only primary devices used by consumers and excludes corporate purchases and devices whose primary users are younger than 13 years.

Exactly how ginormous is Android?

Exactly how ginormous is Android?:
There is no denying that Android, Google’s operating system for mobile devices, is big. For example, Android is the OS on 42% of all consumer compute devices.
We have scoured the web for data that will help us show exactly how big Android is in the smartphone world. And in every way we looked at it, Android is ginormous.

Smartphone web traffic

In terms of smartphone web traffic, Android leads the way, but perhaps not in the same crushing way as in other areas.
Web traffic is interesting, because it gives us an indication of the actual use of smartphones. Looking at the past four years, Android is the only mobile OS that has been constantly growing in use. Currently, Android’s share of smartphone web traffic stands at 37%.

For the last year, it looks as this is going to be a two-horse race between Android and iOS. All the other mobile operation systems seem do be doomed to a slow death, getting used less and less.

Market shares in the top 5 Android and iOS markets

In terms of sales, the two biggest markets for Android and iOS devices are China and the USA. The leading OS in both these markets is Android. In fact, the same is true for all five top Android and iOS markets.

Android’s progress in China does not get any less impressive when you consider that China recently passed the USA as the biggest market for Android and iOS devices.

Android outpaces growing smartphone market

In just a year, from Q4 2011 to Q4 2012, the worldwide smartphone market grew by almost 40%. However, Android in the same time period, grew by an amazing 88%.

Here are some other numbers worth noting:

• For Q4 2012, the worldwide market for smartphones was 208 million devices.
• Out of this, Android’s share was 144.7 million smartphones and iOS accounted for 43.5 million smartphones.
• Shipments of iOS smartphones increased by about 23%.
• For all other mobile operating systems, it looks bleak. Their combined share is down from 25% to 10%.

Largest smartphone manufacturer; it’s an Android brand

While there is only one manufacturer that uses iOS, there are several that use Android as the OS on their mobile devices. So even though there are more Android smartphones that ship, the biggest manufacturer could still be Apple. But it´s not, not even close.

Yes, it is true that Samsung also makes smartphones with other operating systems than Android. But according to recent numbers, 94% of all Samsung smartphones run on Android. That means 214 million units, still way ahead of Apple.

It’s an Android world

So far, everything has shown that Android rules the smartphone OS world. This doesn’t change if you look at the market share worldwide for smartphones. With a 65% market share of worldwide smartphone sales at the end of last year, Android dwarfs the 20% share that iOS had.

It will be very interesting to see these numbers at the end of 2013. Surely this growth can’t continue, or can it?

Android is up everywhere you look

Nothing in our data, and we mean nothing, indicates that Android is going to start losing ground in the smartphone market. Actually, everything points in the other direction, it is up everywhere you look.
What will be interesting to see during 2013 is what will happen to Windows Phone and BlackBerry. Will they at least make the smartphone market a bit more interesting, and not just a big Android show with the iOS sidekick?

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Internet Explorer continues growth past 55% market share thanks to IE9 and IE10, as Chrome hits 17-month low

Internet Explorer continues growth past 55% market share thanks to IE9 and IE10, as Chrome hits 17-month low:
Last month we said 2013 wouldn’t disappoint in the battle of the top three browsers, and boy were we right. February was the fourth full month of IE10 availability as well as when new versions of competing browsers launched in the same week: Firefox 19 and Chrome 25. The latest market share numbers from Net Applications show that Chrome is so far still the only loser in 2013.
Between January and February, Internet Explorer gained 0.68 percentage points (from 55.14 percent to 55.82 percent) and Firefox was up 0.18 percentage points (from 19.94 percent to 20.12 percent). Chrome meanwhile fell a huge 1.21 percentage points (from 17.48 percent to 16.27 percent). Safari was up 0.18 percentage points to 5.42 percent and Opera picked up 0.10 percentage points to grab 0.55 percent.

At 55.82 percent, Internet Explorer is still growing. January was the first time the browser went back above the 55 mark in a long time, and February showed it won’t be losing that crown just yet. Despite Windows 8′s release and gains, however, IE10 continues to have a hard time pushing things forward.
At 1.58 percent in January, the browser gained just 0.29 percentage points last month while IE9 recovered after its first loss in January, propelling to 21.67 percent (down by 0.74 percent percentage points). There is some good news for IE10 though, it’s available for Windows 7 now, so we should see some accelerated growth in the coming months.
IE8 lost 0.16 percentage points, but it’s still the world’s most popular browser at 23.38 percent. IE7 was down 0.12 percentage points and IE6 fell a nice 0.36 percentage points. Everyone can’t wait for it to fall below the 5 percent mark, but that won’t happen till sometime later this year (and China is delaying things).

At 20.12 percent, Firefox continues to hover at the one-fifth-of-the-market mark. Firefox 19 managed to grab 3.32 percentage points, which naturally would have been higher if the browser was available for a full month. Firefox 18 grabbed 2.77 percentage points, while all the older versions lost share: Firefox 17 fell 5.00 percentage points, Firefox 16 was down 0.26 percentage points, and Firefox 15 lost 0.07 percentage points.

At 16.27 percent, Chrome took a serious beating in February. We haven’t seen the browser at the 16 percent mark since September 2011. Late last year, it saw three months of losses in a row, and now it’s two for three again after its losses in January. Nevertheless, Chrome 25 grabbed 3.14 percentage points, while Chrome 24 grabbed 2.18 percentage points. Chrome 23 was down 6.13 percentage points and Chrome 22 fell 0.12 percentage points.
As we already mentioned, new versions of Firefox and Chrome were released two days apart this month. Thanks to Mozilla’s and Google’s automatic updating systems, the majority of their respective users will be on Firefox 19 and Chrome 25 by the end of March.
While we’ve been waiting for Chrome to pass Firefox for a while now, it’s becoming less and less likely. February seems to be just a blip, though this is just speculation right now. IE9 will soon pass IE8, taking the crown as the world’s most popular browser version, and hopefully IE10 will pass IE7 and IE6.
Net Applications uses data captured from 160 million unique visitors each month. The service monitors some 40,000 Web sites for its clients. StatCounter is another popular service for watching market share moves; the company looks at 15 billion page views. To us, it makes more sense to keep track of users than page views.
Nevertheless, for Februar 2013, StatCounter listed Chrome as first with 37.09 percent market share, IE in second with 29.82 percent, Firefox in third with 21.34 percent, Safari with 8.60 percent, and Opera with 1.22 percent. The only part everyone agrees on is that Safari and Opera are not in the top three.
See also – Windows 8 now up to 2.79% market share as Windows 7 stabilizes after its first decline
Image credit: Hugo Humberto Plácido da Silva

comScore: Apple increases lead as top US smartphone maker while Samsung gains; Android and iOS fortify duopoly

comScore: Apple increases lead as top US smartphone maker while Samsung gains; Android and iOS fortify duopoly:
Apple may not be king when it comes to smartphones around the world, but at home it ended 2012 as the top OEM. In the US, Apple is increasing its share in first place and Samsung is slowly gaining on it in second. Rounding out the top five are HTC, Motorola, and LG.
The story is similar in the platform space, although slightly reversed: Google is first courtesy of Android, Apple is second with iOS, but the latter is gaining on the former. Again, rounding out the top five are BlackBerry, Microsoft, and Symbian.
The latest data comes from comScore, which as usual surveyed over 30,000 mobile subscribers in the US (although it limited its results to smartphones this time, for some reason). The analytics firm says 125.9 Americans owned smartphones (54 percent mobile market penetration) in December, up 5 percent since September.
Between those two months, here is how the top five smartphones OEMs have fared:

As you can see, Apple gained 2.0 percentage points in terms of smartphone subscribers (from 34.3 percent to 36.3 percent) while Samsung jumped 2.3 percentage points (from 18.7 percent to 21.0 percent). HTC fell 1.8 percentage points (from 12.0 percent to 10.2 percent), Motorola dropped 0.7 percentage points (from 9.8 percent to 9.1 percent), and LG managed to gain 0.7 percentage points (from 6.6 percent to 7.1 percent).
Samsung and Apple gained a combined 4.3 percentage points while the other three lost 2.0 percentage points together. In other words, the duo is even stealing share from OEMs not in the top five.
It appears that the iPhone 5 is helping keep Apple ahead, but Samsung isn’t really affected. Meanwhile, we can attribute LG’s gains to Google marketing the Nexus 4, although sales have been limited by supply issues.
Meanwhile, on the software side, Google is dominating and Apple is moving ahead in second place. Everyone else is losing share or has already become irrelevant (take your pick):

Samsung may be slowly gaining on Apple in the smartphone space, but iOS is growing faster overall when compared to Android, at least in this snapshot. Google gained 0.9 percentage points between September and December (up from 52.5 percent to 53.4 percent) to further pull ahead in first place. Apple increased its share by 2.0 percentage points (moving from 34.3 percent to 36.3 percent).
Meanwhile, BlackBerry is down 2.0 percentage points (from 8.4 percent to 6.4 percent), Microsoft lost 0.7 percentage points (from 3.6 percent to 2.9 percent), and Symbian seems to have stagnated at 0.6 percent. Naturally, we’ll be looking closely to see if BlackBerry can recover in the coming months with its BlackBerry 10 launch, though it will be very difficult as the company continues to be the biggest loser in these studies, month after month.
Again looking at the winners and losers, Google and Apple gained a combined 2.9 percentage points, while the other three lost 2.7 percent. The duopoly is even stealing from other smartphone OS makers as Americans seem to be perfectly happy to choose between the two camps.
Image credit: Jung Yeon-Je/Getty Images

China to hit 246m Android and iOS devices this month, taking it past the US to become world’s largest market

China to hit 246m Android and iOS devices this month, taking it past the US to become world’s largest market:
This month, China is slated to pass the US to become the world’s top country for active Android and iOS smartphones and tablets. In January 2013, China and the US had roughly the same active device installed base: 221 million and 222 million, respectively. By the end of February 2013, China will have an estimated 246 million devices compared to 230 million in the US.
The findings come from Flurry, which tracks over 2.4 billion anonymous app sessions per day across more than 275,000 apps around the world, and says it can reliably measure activity across more than 90 percent of the world’s smartphones and tablets. Based on historical growth trends as well as the number of detected devices per country through the first of this month, the company estimated its numbers for the end of this month.
Here’s the historic data with the projection in graph form:

If China really does claim gold from the US in February, it will be exactly 12 months since Flurry reported that the country had become the world’s fastest growing market for smartphones and tablets. The company unsurprisingly doesn’t expect the US to take back the lead from China, citing the countries’ populations: just over 310 million versus over 1.3 billion, respectively.
The only country that could feasibly take that spot is India, which has a population of just over 1.2 billion. Yet it is currently in 10th place with 19 million smartphones and tablets, according to Flurry:

Interestingly, both the US and China have more than five times the active installed base than that of the UK, the world’s third largest market. Furthermore, both countries continue to see rapid device adoption.
China may no longer lead the world in growth, but it still commanded an impressive 209 percent rate on top of a base of 71 million devices from January 2012. The below chart excludes countries with less than half a million devices as of January 2012:

Only Columbia, Vietnam, Turkey, Ukraine, and Egypt grew faster than China. Year-over-year, compared to January 2012, the US added 55 million new devices, while China added 150 million new devices. Flurry says China would have passed the US earlier, given its growth rate, but the American holiday season delayed the inevitable for an additional two months.
See also – Duopoly: 98% of Q4 smartphone shipments in China were powered by Android or iOS, at 86% and 12% respectively and Despite the iPhone’s monumental Q4, Android still powered 50% of all smartphones sold
Image credit: Gary Tamin

Survey Report: Android And iOS Most Popular Development Platforms, But Developers Looking For Alternatives

Survey Report: Android And iOS Most Popular Development Platforms, But Developers Looking For Alternatives:
Market strategy firm Vision Mobile just released their fourth annual survey report “Developer Economics 2013″. For the report, subtitled “Developer Tools: Foundations of the App Economy”. 3,460 developers across 95 countries were surveyed. The report contains interesting insights into developer mindshare, revenue and lead platforms. This report specifically, also focuses on developer tools, incl. ad-networks, back-end as a service, cross-platfrom tools, cross-promotion networks, user analytics, and voice services.
The full report is available free of charge here.
We would like to highlight a few of the findings regarding app distribution in the app stores.
Android continues to lead mobile developer mindshare, with 72% of developers now developing for the platform, a 4 percentage point increase compared to our 2012 survey. iOS shows a 5 percentage point drop, to 56%, in Mindshare, which we attribute mostly to the influx of Asian developers showing a clear preference towards Android. The considerable share of mobile developers intending to adopt Windows Phone (47%) and BB10 (15%) indicate that there is still developer interest in a viable third app ecosystem.

The report also gave some insights into the effect on revenue of developing for multiple platforms. 74% of developers use two or more platforms concurrently. On average mobile developers use 2.6 mobile platforms in our latest research, compared to 2.7 in 2012 and 3.2 in our 2011 research. The Android-iOS duopoly in smartphone sales is gradually creating a concentration of developers around these two platforms: 80% of respondents in our sample develop for Android, iOS or both, making them the baseline in any platform mix. Developers that do not develop for one of these two platforms generate, on average, half the revenue of those developers that do, leaving little doubt as to the concentration of power within these two major ecosystems.
  For more results from the survey, you can download the full report here.

Report: Amazon dominates Android tablets, US-based Kindle Fires alone are 33% of global devices

Report: Amazon dominates Android tablets, US-based Kindle Fires alone are 33% of global devices:
Google entered the tablet market with its Nexus 7 range last year but it is Amazon, the US retailer that has a somewhat strained relationship with the search giant, that is dominating the Android tablet market worldwide with its Kindle Fire range, a new report claims.
Research from mobile app analytics service Localytics which goes live tomorrow shows that the Kindle Fire is by far and away the most owned Android tablet on the planet. The company estimates that the number of Amazon Fire devices in the US alone represents 33 percent of all Android tablets worldwide — while the US itself is the world’s biggest tablet market with a 59 percent market share.
There is a key reason behind that factor, namely the limited availability of the Kindle Fire range itself. Initially available in the US only, Amazon later released its devices in selected European markets but Localytics estimates that 89 percent of Kindle Fires are based in the US.
Localytics doesn’t break out device metrics for other tablets but, with US based Kindle devices according for a third of all Android tablets worldwide, it is well ahead of the Nexus 7 (US ownership is 8 percent of the worldwide total), Samsung’s Galaxy range (9 percent) and Barnes and Noble’s Nook (10 percent).

Of course, it goes without saying that these are estimates (notably devoid of raw sales or shipments figures) but they present an interesting snapshot of the Android tablet market as it stands today. Localytics says it has “insights into over 500 million unique devices” which have run its analytics and in-app marketing solution.
Apple’s iPad has long defined the industry, there’s no doubt in that, but it stands to reason that the broad range of Android partners and devices that they produce will, at some point, eat into Apple’s dominance of the market — as has happened with global smartphone numbers. Likewise, the growing maturity of Google’s Nexus 7 tablets are likely to challenge Amazon. Though initial supply has been limited, consumer demand has been buoyant…though Google lacks the range of devices, width of price points and market maturity of the Kindle Fire.
Over time one might expect adoption of Android tablets to grow out of the US, and likewise Amazon’s share of the Android tablet eco-system to lessen as devices from others grow their footprint overseas. However, running counter to that, Amazon is focusing on taking its success global but internationalizing the Kindle. Given that it makes a loss on the sale of devices — content is its real money earner — it has the potential to use aggressive pricing strategies to draw in new and existing tablet owners across the world like few other players can.
Indeed, it could be hugely disruptive in China when it finally launches there. Amazon’s app store has already gone live in the country, so it seems like it is only a matter of time before the Kindle, Kindle Fire and others arrive.
As it stands today, aside from the US and UK, Localytics says that “no other country has even one percent of worldwide Kindle Fires”. We know that tablet option is at its highest in Western markets, that can be seen as a huge opportunity for growth, or potential for the competition.
Enders Analysis analyst Benedict Evans recently looked at what Google stands to gain from Android. While much of the motivation is to help technology reach the hands of new users, Google’s services are baked into the operating system. As it stands, given that Amazon’s own fork of Android cuts out a number of key Google properties — most notable the Google Play app and content store — its continued dominance is lessening the impact of said Google services in Android.
Overall, the takeaway for Android developers is clear, ignore the Kindle at your peril, as Localytics explains:

In the meantime, any Android developer with a focus on tablets should be distributing their apps in the Amazon App Store. The degree to which Amazon has dominated their most serious geographical market should speak to the future potential, and since Google Play is unavailable on the Kindle Fire family, adding Amazon’s App Store as a distribution channel is important.

Headline image via by who_da_fly / Flickr

The State of the Mobile App World

Mobile Application Development infographic

Time it takes to build an APP

How Long Does it Take to Build an App? infographic by Angelina.

Smartphones: Still Room to Grow in Emerging Countries

Smartphones: Still Room to Grow in Emerging Countries:

While smartphones have gone mainstream in many regions around the globe, adoption among emerging countries is still developing. According to new research from Nielsen, China is the only country among the high-growth BRIC (Brazil, Russia, India, China) markets where smartphones are predominant, owned by two-thirds of Chinese mobile subscribers as of the first half of 2012. In contrast, feature phones—devices with no touchscreen, QWERTY keypad or operating system—are still dominant in India and Russia, owned by 80 percent and 51 percent of mobile subscribers, respectively. There’s no clear favorite type of mobile device in Brazil, with mobile ownership split between 44 percent feature phones, 36 percent smartphones and 21 percent multimedia phones (touchscreen and/or QWERTY keypad, but no operating system).

Much in the same manner as social media, smartphones–with their advanced functionality and access to a multitude of apps–influence everything from consumers’ interaction with both brands and each other, to and shopping and purchase decisions.
Methodology
China and Russia – Online survey of 3,900 mobile subscribes aged 16 and older who were asked to identify what type of mobile device they own. Due to the online-only methodology in China, which excludes a large portion of China’s rural population, smartphone penetration may skew high.
India – In-person interviews with 3,900 mobile subscribers aged 16 and older who were asked to identify what type of mobile device they own.
Brazil – Phone interviews with 1,000 mobile subscribers aged 16 and older who were asked to identify what type of mobile device they own.
Look for Nielsen at Mobile World Congress 2013 where our mobile experts will present insights on the everyday mobile behaviors of global consumers.

World map of top social networks shows just five left, Facebook dominates 127 out of 137 countries

World map of top social networks shows just five left, Facebook dominates 127 out of 137 countries:
Every June and December, social media strategist Vincenzo Cosenza updates his “world map of social networks” to show what the most popular service is in every country around the world. The latest update, for December 2012, reveals that we’re down to just five top social networks, and that Facebook now dominates 127 of the 137 countries worldwide tracked by Alexa.
With over 1 billion monthly active users, more than 600 million of which are mobile, it’s not surprising that Facebook has retained its number one spot. If anything, the service has all but ran out of countries to conquer: it now faces the tough battle of unseating very popular local competitors in countries where governments block the site.

Nevertheless, Facebook’s continued dominance is mainly thanks to growth in Asia where it has some 278 million users, according to the Facebook Ads Platform, recently surpassing Europe’s 251 million as the largest continent on the site. North America has 243 million users, South America has 142 million, Africa is at almost 52 million, and Oceania has just 15 million. In 2012, Facebook became the number one social network in Armenia, Kyrgyzstan, Latvia, and Vietnam.
The December 2012 edition of Cosenza’s map shows that the following five social networks are at the top in at least one country in the world: Facebook, QZone, V Kontakte, Odnoklassniki, and Cloob. In Russian territories, V Kontakte is beating out Odnoklassniki thanks to its now 190 million registered users, while QZone owns the Asian landscape with 552 million users, and in Iran, Cloob has taken over since Facebook access is difficult due to state censorship.

Let’s compare this to the previous reports. There were 17 social networks in June 2009, 16 in December 2009, 14 in June 2010, 11 in December 2010, nine in June 2011, six in December 2011, and seven in June 2012. Social networks Drauglem and Zing were knocked off by V Kontakte and Facebook, respectively.
How long will it be before Facebook starts losing its prized number one spot?

When will smartphones reach saturation?

When will smartphones reach saturation?:

50% penetration for smartphones in the US turned out to be fairly predictable. I tracked my predictions based on comScore data and the results are shown in the following graph.

I began making predictions in May 2010 and updated the estimate every month since. As the chart shows, the prediction converged to early September 2012 by early 2011. The actual date was sometime in late August 2012.
The reason this prediction was relatively easy was because the rate of penetration growth was mostly linear throughout the period of 2009 to 2012 or from 17% to 50%.
In fact, the consistency continues even above 50%. The following chart shows the weekly new smartphone users add rate. No slowing seems to be evident for the few months since 50% penetration was achieved.

So if we assume that this rate will be preserved or increase slightly, how soon can we expect smartphones will reach 80% penetration in the US?

My guess is now August 2014.

Jelly Bean Claims 14% of Android Web Usage in Six Months

Jelly Bean Claims 14% of Android Web Usage in Six Months:
As a leading open source platform, Android has a lot of things going for it. However, version distribution fragmentation is a problem that has plagued the OS and its manufacturing partners since almost day one. To identify the current level of version fragmentation seen in the Android OS, Chitika Insights conducted a research study sampling data from the Chitika Ad Network.
To quantify this study, Chitika Insights analyzed a sample of tens of millions of Android impressions (both phones and tablets) running through the Chitika Ad Network. A user agent analysis was conducted to determine whether Android was the OS of the mobile impression. This data was drawn across a seven day period, ranging across December 28, 2012 to January 3, 2013 from impressions originating in the US and Canada. A graph depicting the latest Android version distribution can be seen below:

Gingerbread stands as the leading version of Android, responsible for 42% of all usage. Ice Cream Sandwich, one of the more recent versions of Android, captures second place, accounting for 34% of all Android usage. Finally, Jelly Bean, the most recent version of Android, makes up 14% of all Android usage – certainly a step in the right direction.
Stay tuned to Chitika Insights for future research and reports focusing on Android and the Mobile industry.

IE10 below 1% market share, Firefox back under 20%, Chrome recovers from three months of losses

IE10 below 1% market share, Firefox back under 20%, Chrome recovers from three months of losses:
December 2012 finished off last year with quite some interesting moves from the top three browsers. It was the second full month of IE10 availability as well as the first full month of Mozilla Firefox 17 and Google Chrome 23. The latest market share numbers from Net Applications show that Firefox and Safari were the only losers at the end of 2012.
See also – Windows gains market share after six months of decline: Windows 8 grabs 1.64%, Windows 7 passes 45%
Between November and December, Internet Explorer gained 0.01 percentage points. Firefox meanwhile fell a whopping 0.62 percentage points, while Chrome managed to gain a huge 0.80 percentage points (though it still did not manage to regain its losses from the previous month). Safari dipped 0.09 percentage points and Opera picked up 0.04 percentage points.

At 54.77 percent, Internet Explorer is still growing, although more slowly. While it may not have ended the year with 55 percent of the pie, it still has more than half of it. Despite Windows 8′s release, however, IE10 is having a hard time pushing things forward.
IE10 managed to capture just 0.96 percent in December, while IE9 grew to 21.35 percent (up by 0.55 percent percentage points). IE8 lost just a sizeable 1.20 percentage points, but it’s still the world’s most popular browser at 23.29 percent. IE7 dipped 0.15 percentage points and IE6 somehow managed to gain 0.01 percentage points. Everyone can’t wait for it to fall below the 5 percent mark, but that won’t happen till sometime this year; even Microsoft wants it to die; but China isn’t letting that happen.

At 19.82 percent, Firefox has once again fallen under one-fifth of the market, a spot it seems to be hovering around. Firefox 17 managed to grab another 9.59 percentage points, at mainly Firefox 16′s expense which fell 9.65 percentage points. All the older versions lost share: Firefox 15 was down 0.36 percentage points, Firefox 14 was down 0.13 percentage points, and Firefox 13 lost 0.08 percentage points.

At 18.04 percent, Chrome is still just behind Firefox, and now it’s finally gaining again. After three months straight of losses, Google’s browser has failed to pass Firefox in 2012, but is likely to do so this year. Chrome 23 was up 4.90 percentage points, while all the other versions lost share. Chrome 22 was down 3.43 percentage points, Chrome 21 fell 0.12 percentage points, and Chrome 20 dropped 0.21 percentage points. It’s great to see the majority of Chrome users on the latest version.
Before 2012 was out, I predicted IE9 to pass IE8, Chrome to pass Firefox, and for IE10 to start a steady growth, all before the end of the year. The first two did not happen, and the third is showing a weak start so far.
Net Applications uses data captured from 160 million unique visitors each month. The service monitors some 40,000 Web sites for its clients. StatCounter is another popular service for watching market share moves; the company looks at 15 billion page views.
To us, it makes more sense to keep track of users than of page views. Nevertheless, for December 2012, StatCounter listed Chrome as first with 36.42 percent share, IE in second with 30.78 percent, Firefox in third with 21.89 percent, Safari with 7.92 percent, and Opera with 1.26 percent.
Update: Net Applications tweaked its figures and the data in this post has been updated accordingly.
Image credit: Hugo Humberto Plácido da Silva

Smartphone Wars in Asia

Smartphone Wars in Asia:
In a special release for October, we partnered with AIP Singapore to look at Asian sentiments towards smartphones in Asia, which found that nearly one in five Asians who were early iPhone buyers said the phone has failed to meet their expectations, whilst one in 3 intend to buy a smartphone in the next 12 months.

The last feature phone

The last feature phone:

During the last 12 months 31 million American phone users abandoned the use of feature phones. During the last 24 months over 60 million switched. Over 550k users are switching every week and this rate of switching has not changed much since late 2009.

Some of this switching has to do with demand for smartphone services but some of it is also due to a decreasing supply of non-smart phones. The shelf space being allocated to smartphones is nearing 100%. My single sampling of a Wal-Mart store shows the following data:

Looking at individual carriers, AT&T ranged one feature phone and 7 smart SKUs. Verizon’s ratio was 2:8 and T-Mobile’s was 4:5.
T-Mobile has been lagging in smartphone adoption and as they transition in 2013 it’s possible that the AT&T ratio of 12% shelf space dedicated to feature phones will become the norm for the US. And as the US goes, the world will follow.
With shrinking shelf space comes an accelerated decline in the product category. It may not come in 2013, and perhaps not buy 2014 but it’s quite possible that by 2015 the last feature phone will make its appearance in the US.