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Mobile Browsing Explodes in December, Android Big Winner With 54.8% Gain

Mobile browsing now accounts for 1.3% of all web browsing, according to the latest figures released by NetApplications yesterday. A brief post on their web site claims that mobile devices were the biggest usage share winners this past holiday season. All major mobile operating systems attained large percentage gains; with Android leading the pack obtaining twice the gain of the competition!

Browsing by Device Category Trend

1.3% market share might not seem like a lot at first, but when you think that's more than half of Opera's market share, it really helps put that figure in perspective. These are the numbers for each of the leading mobile platforms:

Mobile O/S Percentage Gain (November - December)
Android +54.8%
Blackberry +22.2%
iPhone +20.1%
Symbian +19.0%
Java ME +15.6%

A detailed look at Android's worldwide trend, shows solid growth throughout the year, but a definitive spike on Novemeber and December, indisputably ignited by US events like Droid's ad campaign, the holiday offers on most Android devices and the fact that is now carried by 3 of the 4 nationwide mobile operators.

Browsing trend for Android

Net Applications measures browser usage share by tracking the systems used to visit the 40,000 sites it monitors for clients, which results in a pool of about 160 million unique visitors per month. Their numbers have been widely used to measure the pulse of browser usage trends.

I'm a Software Engineer and extremely passionate Smartphone enthusiast; I've been working with mobile devices for a long time and contributing to the mobile community for about as long. Currently I'm a contributor for AndroidGuys.com and move on the Android space in general, before that I was a contributor to the Windows Mobile community as part of the "Board of Experts" at the Smartphone & Pocket PC magazine Best Software Awards; and I also served as Technical Reviewer for a Microsoft Learning official course on Windows Mobile 6 Development (Course 6066A). You can follow me on Twitter -> http://twitter.com/jdgx

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  • Rene

    "3 of the 4 nationwide mobile operators."

    Which nation? Or more to the point, which numbers are US Market en which are global? It really messes with statistics when mixing local and global numbers.

  • Stacey

    I think the point was to show how Android is beating out the competition. Especially now that Google is releasing the Nexus One which surpasses the Iphone in many ways and matches it in all others. Iphone has nothing that beats it with the exception of Itunes and more apps, but the Android apps are coming, you just have to give them time to develop them :-)

  • http://intensedebate.com/people/juandg Juan Gomez

    You're right Rene, my Bad!

    But it's fixed now, thanks for your observations.
    Just to clear it out a little bit though, figures are worldwide, but it's undeniable that US events affected the chart a lot, hence my remarks about it; hope they have a little bit more context now.

  • http://www.celltwitts.com/story.php?id=34 pligg.com

    Mobile Browsing Explodes in December, Android Big Winner With 54.8% Gain...

    Mobile browsing now accounts for 1.3% of all web browsing, according to the latest figures released by NetApplications yesterday. A brief post on their web site claims that mobile devices were the biggest usage share winners this past holiday season. A...

  • Sam

    Good news, but I hate statistic articles because they're always misleading. Android went up 54%, iPhones went up 20.1%...that's fine. But (and I don't have the numbers, so I'll make these up) say there's an installed base of 50mil iPhones and an installed base of 10mil Android phones. These gains indicate that 10mil additional iPhones were sold and 5mil additional Android phones were sold. Even though 54% sounds a lot more impressive when taken out of perspective, it's not when you look at the big picture. I'm assuming that 90% of the Android gains are directly due to the release of the Droid.

  • https://muhammadf0628.student.ipb.ac.id farhad

    whoa thanks man, i never read about this before..