Android Mobile Web Browsing Traffic Share Rapidly Climbing

Written by John Thompson on April 2, 2010 · Filed under Tech 

Recent data published by Admob has shown a huge increase in the mobile web browsing traffic share of Google’s Android OS in the past few months, coming from nowhere to challenge the iPhone’s dominance in the market.

Looking back to October 2008, the mobile OS had three main players consisting of the iPhone OS, RIM and Windows Mobile. Each OS had 20-30% of the market, and things were looking quite even. Looking ahead to the peak of the iPhone’s share, however, takes us to May of last year, with the iPhone having a staggering 70% of the mobile OS traffic share, compared with RIM who were struggling at under 20%, with both Windows Mobile and Android at just under 10%.

The decline of RIM and Windows Mobile in a relatively short period of time is down to the rapid growth of the iPhone across USA (the statistics show the traffic share of the US market), which left other competitors out in the cold. What we wouldn’t have expected since then is the huge level of uptake of Google Android devices, which have climbed steadily over the past year to challenge the iPhone’s dominance in the saturated market. Perhaps the open nature of the Android operating system also encourages people to use their mobile phone more for general browsing, especially as we’re seeing handsets such as the Nexus One and HTC Desire with larger and higher resolution screens.

Interestingly this has happened despite having several current Android versions and its fragmentation among devices that we’ve seen happening, perhaps that isn’t such a big issue after all?

Also when you can easily tether your Android mobile phone to your laptop, this presumably opens up further possiblilities of using its internet connection and thus further increase its web traffic share on top of these figures?

Other interesting facts included in AdMob’s Mobile Metrics report are that smartphones account for “48% of AdMob’s worldwide traffic” in February 2010, compared with 35% this time last year. The report also goes on to say that “In absolute terms, smartphone traffic increased 193% over the last year”.

If you want to read the full report, you can do so at AdMob.

Via – Ars Technica