PercentMobile Maps - 2nd Quarter 2010
Welcome to our first round of PercentMobile Maps. Our goal is to introduce you to the wonderfully diverse global mobile ecosystem. All maps are based on second quarter 2010 visits to sites that are tracked with our mobile analytics system.
Nokia Devices Web Usage
Lets start with the CEO searching and share dropping Finnish giant. Once globally perceived as the mobile industry leader, Nokia is now struggling with its quickly aging operating systems and number pad phones. While it currently has a stronghold in the largest and most populous countries, most of those phones are quite old and many will soon need to be replaced. The large majority are inexpensive phones with less profit margin and no attractive digital media store.
Apple Devices Web Usage
A phenomenon, Apple rose from nothing in the summer of 2007 to a mobile superpower with amazing interface concepts, fantastic web experience, attractive applications and its iTunes digital media store. It speaks to their success that nearly everyone is trying to copy them.
BlackBerry Devices Web Usage
It used to be that the most recognizable feature of a businessman or politician was their suit. Now it is the symbiotic relationship with their BlackBerry device. Joining their ranks are teenagers who pump out text messages quickly thanks to BlackBerry’s built-in QWERTY keyboard, optimized for “thumbing.” An indication of BlackBerry’s success is that several companies such as Nexian, ZTE, Tianyu, Videocon and ti-phone are attempting to clone these iconic devices.
Samsung Devices Web Usage
The South Korean Conglomerate brand is found on everything from Chips, LCD Displays, Refrigerator, and Ships to the shirts of the English Premier League Team the Chelsea Football Club. Their mobile phones run Bada OS, Windows Mobile, Symbian, Android and their own proprietary Operating System. It is perhaps the most diverse cell phone company, which is not surprising given its mothership nature.
WiFi Usage
Mobile phones with WiFi connectivity began to appear in 2006 with the Nokia N93. Now, most Smart and Experience Phones come equipped standard with WiFi. Their promise is faster speed and cost-free mobile browsing. Downsides include heavy battery usage, and not all user interfaces make it easy to select a WiFi network. The map below shows how actual users of WiFi-enabled mobile phones take advantage of the WiFi feature. Please note that we have excluded Non-Phones such as iPad, iPod, Sony PSP, etc. from this map.
Device Age
Last but not least, let’s have a look at the average release date of mobile devices used by country. Most countries in the Americas and Western Europe have newer devices, while most countries in Asia and the Middle East have slightly older devices, and many African countries have the oldest devices.
“
But all these “big boys” [Google Analytics and WebTrends and others] have simply “added on” mobile analytics to their tools. The result is that they suffer from both a lack of imagination and, this is important, truly great databases when it comes to devices and carriers and other unique mobile information.
Not Percent Mobile.
They have two incredible benefits:
1. A really expansive and accurate database and detection mechanism when it comes to mobile platforms.
2. A really simple UI and reporting layer, even your mom will understand the data.
”Trendspotting with PercentMobile
Just as with the world at large, the mobile ecosystem is in constant motion. It grows and changes, sometimes significantly, sometimes subtly, every day. We want you to easily learn and understand those changes happening right now on your Site using Mobile Analytics by PercentMobile.
With this post the team is excited to introduce to you a new feature called ‘Trending’ which, after being used extensively internally, is now available for free on every Mobile Analytics Report for every user.
Using the feature ourselves has quickly and easily given us insight we couldn’t have gotten before on the mobile ecosystem at large. The results can be viewed in our recently published post “Second Quarter 2010 Mobile Ecosystem Highlights” where we gathered trending highlights on Operating Systems, Phone Types and WiFi Usage over the past 6 months.
For example, using the Trending feature we were able to observe a 95% increase in Android OS usage in the US (and a 94% increase in Europe respectively) across our network of tracked sites, which otherwise would not have been easily possible. Being able to perceive changes like this yields almost immediately a call to action in terms of consideration of the Android OS platform overall. We find this very exciting to know. It’s beautiful.
Click here or image above for full view.
With Trending you are now able to observe changes in most of your Reporting-dimensions.
To get you started, we would like to ask you:
- Have WiFi-capable Devices been growing on your Site?
- And what about iPads and other Non-Phone mobile devices? Can you find out if they’re becoming a growing audience of yours?
- How are older Feature-Phones doing compared to highly interactive Experience-Phones?
- Is traffic from iPhone OS Devices such as the iPhone, iPods and iPads growing or slowing?
- Has your Site become more popular with owners of RIM OS Blackberry Devices?
- Can you find a former unknown-to-you Network Operator climbing up hundred-fold within the last month?
- Which country has dropped interest in your offering and which country is showing growing interest?
- Have you noticed a drop or rise in WiFi usage and can you imagine why that is?
If you are already using PercentMobile, we highly recommend you sign in to your Reports right now and check out what insights your new Trending feature can offer you. If you are new to PercentMobile, get started to track your Sites by registering today.
We hope you will enjoy this new level of comprehension of your mobile ecosystem. Our objective always has been to make things simple and understandable so you can concentrate on what really matters to you.
With best wishes,
Your PercentMobile team.
11% of Web Traffic Worldwide is Now Mobile
Mobile traffic to sites designed for the desktop Web have increased over the last 6 months from 8.3% to 11%, a 32% increase.
PercentMobile’s Take On @drbarnard’s, “Anti-Competitive AND Potentially Creepy”
“Oh, and there’s also AdMob’s incredibly flakey “Mobile Metrics” reports. They do such a hatchet job on those it must drive Apple nuts”
— Anti-Competitive AND Potentially Creepy - @drbarnard (via @rafer)
…and Cult of Mac on AdMob, “Don’t be surprised to see a report six months from now showing Apple’s mobile web traffic dropping by half or more. All of which suggests that a mobile ad network isn’t the best source for reporting the totality of mobile web traffic. Wouldn’t it be nice if all the mobile carriers got together and shared what they knew?”
PercentMobile’s Take
So who’s report on the OS war is closer to reality? AdMob showing their parent company Google winning with Android? Or, Apple’s sources of statistics that show a very different story.
As an independent mobile analytics provider we perceive the ecosystem differently. We ran a report on a sample of the mobile Web traffic that flows through PercentMobile’s network.
This is what we saw:
…and Blackberry (RIM) does better then anyone gives them credit for.
PercentMobile on, “Mobile OS web-browsing share” by @marcoarment
reblogged from: marco
Some people are criticizing John Gruber’s piece on iPad and Android browser share because Apple-product owners are more likely to visit his site (a bias he clearly acknowledged). I was curious to see more widespread numbers, so I got permission to post Tumblr’s OS percentages from Google Analytics for the tumblelog network.
This includes most human visits to all Tumblr-hosted blogs, not the tumblr.com site itself, to best represent “average” people online who happen to come across Tumblr-hosted sites, not just Tumblr members. Granted, this still isn’t perfect, but it’s probably the biggest and least biased sample that we’ll be able to find in the indie-Mac-pundit world.
Left: Including “normal” computers. Right: Only mobile devices.
Sample from May 9-15, 2010, as measured by Google Analytics.The most surprising part of this, to me, is how well the Macintosh is faring against Windows. But in the mobile space, Android is actually doing quite well, given its tiny installed base relative to iPhone OS. My premise in this post may have been completely wrong.
The iPad is putting up an especially impressive performance given that it’s only available in the U.S. so far, has only been on sale for 6 weeks, costs at least $500, isn’t subsidized, isn’t always in your pocket, and isn’t being given away in two-for-$99 sales by the largest cellular provider in the country.
PercentMobile:
@marco (and Tumblr), thanks for the breath of fresh air.
Most of the numbers we see online are from mobile analytic services that primarily report on people visiting apps or ads on iPhone, Android, or Blackberry devices. Traffic from the rest of the mobile ecosystem is usually underrepresented and as such marginalized.
The data from the tumblelog network can certainly provide a more realistic sample.
Unfortunately, improving the sample is only part of the equation. The other part is correctly collecting and processing that tumblelog data. Google Analytics is not mobile-specific enough to get the job done.
The report you share shows that Smartphone traffic to tumblelog sites represents approximately 93% of tumblelog mobile device traffic. Trends across PercentMobile’s network of sites tells us that the Smartphone crowd should more likely weigh in at around 47%-68% of total mobile traffic. As such, we suspect considerable Feature Phone (and lesser device traffic) is present but not counted. What does that mean to Tumblr? Hard to place a number on it since we’re at arm’s length to your data but you may have up to 2X the mobile traffic you think you have.
