5 ms·

Why Android users surf less than iPhone users

21 points by hisyam 14y ago

mtgx 14y ago
You failed to mention that the iOS Safari market share is the same as Android's, which makes sense considering they have about equal installed bases right now (although the Android one is growing much quicker).
drcube 14y ago
This is ridiculous, if I'm reading it right. For one thing, the carrier I currently use (AT&T), forces you to buy a data plan if you have a smartphone. I'd be surprised if this wasn't the case for all carriers. So that blows the conclusion out of the water. But why ask the question in the first place? Because the Android browser market share is so much lower than the Android market share as a whole? I would presume that "browser share" comes from the web, which can be accessed by all sorts of devices, and "mobile market share" comes just from mobile devices. That alone probably makes the question moot. But even if it didn't, there's Opera, Firefox, Chrome and all sorts of other browsers on Android that could make up the gap. In other words, I doubt the premise (Android users surf the web less) as well as the conclusion (this is due to most Android users being too price averse to use data). I just don't see any evidence of either.
- thoughtsimple 14y ago
  I have a data plan on an iPhone with AT&T and I pay an additional $15 over the standard 450 minute plan for 200 MB of data. I understand that AT&T has raised this minimum to $20 for 300 MB. That price won't break the bank for most people but 200-300 MB for a month of data isn't much. I'm generally on WiFi so I don't care but I suspect that many people would find this too small for comfort. If they don't care about surfing from the phone, I can see people just avoiding using any data at all so that they don't have to worry about additional fees.
  - short_circut 14y ago
    That is exactly the reason I rarely use my phone for browsing. The internet is just too expensive.
  - re_todd 14y ago
    I'm with AT&T and went to the $15/month a couple years ago (don't know if the price went up, I'm on someone else's contract and I've never actually seen the bill). It's a pain to worry about bandwidth, and video is out of the question. Yes, WiFi bandwidth is free, but sometimes I forget to turn on WiFi, then almost have a heart attack when I see how much bandwidth I've consumed (thanks to the "3G Watchdog" app). It's just significantly less stressful to put the android phone down on my desk and just surf on my desktop or laptop on my Cable connection.
- dave1010uk 14y ago
  1. These stats are worldwide. I believe the US phone market isn't very representative and most phone contracts sold last year did not come with lots of inclusive data. 2. These stats are just for mobile devices.
felipeko 14y ago
I'm not sure i agree with his reasons, mostly because what the data really shows is that Android users don't really browse on Wi-Fi [1] (on 3G the discrepancy - device marketshare vs browsing marketshare - is much lower). My opinion (with anecdotal evidence) is that Android users just stick with their PCs when at home (presumably when they have Wi-Fi), whereas iOS users prefer the small screen, for some reason. [1] http://blog.cloudfour.com/explaining-the-ios-and-android-mobile-disparity/ http://blog.cloudfour.com/explaining-the-ios-and-android-mob...
- Tichy 14y ago
  Seriously, they distinguish between mobile browser usage on Wi-Fi vs 3G? That doesn't make much sense, at least not if you wonder what device you should optimize for. Perhaps you could conclude that Wi-Fi surfers would tolerate bigger web sites, though.
danielrm26 14y ago
iOS user here, so bias acknowledged, but I am a mobile security guy and I get new phones quite often. Just last week I fired up the new Google Nexus device from LG and tried to spend a full week on it--for the purpose of being more familiar with Android as a user. I couldn't make it a full 24 hours. This was a fully stock Android experience, on the latest and greatest phone, and Chrome crashed six (6) times on me. Scrolling in the browser was markedly inferior. And the overall experience of reading on the device just felt far worse. I didn't want to read anything on it, honestly. I tried to account for my own bias towards iPhone/iOS, but I don't think it makes up even half of the bad experience I had. In short, I think Android phones discourage, from a UX standpoint, the activity of browsing. And I think that's a much larger factor than that mentioned in the original post.
- ImprovedSilence 14y ago
  I'm an Android user, and I agree completely with this. Browsing the web on Android is a painful experience.
  - dquigley 14y ago
    I've personally had a different experience. (Background: I've had an iPhone 3GS and 4, HTC EVO 4G, a LG Optimus from Sprint and Virgin Mobile, some dirt cheap Android-based Samsung smartphone, and now the Samsung Galaxy Note II. All of these devices I've used for a minimum of multiple days Other than the stock browser on the Samsung Galaxy Note II (which is easily replaced by Google Chrome's mobile browser) I haven't had issues with any Android device browsing the web compared to an iPhone. In fact in my experience, I would without a doubt say Chrome has been a better experience than Safari. Google Chrome's integration with their desktop browser has been awesome since I use Google Chrome on all my desktops. But this is personal experience, and you can't really base all of this off personal experience. Second, if you're used to the iOS interface, switching to Android will be a big adjustment, one that if you only give it 24 hours you won't ever enjoy.
  - mtgx 14y ago
    What does that even mean? Are you talking about the browser itself? About using a low-end Android phone?
jarcoal 14y ago
Android is the default OS, so naturally it picks up a lot of users that don't want to use all of it's core features. No surprises here.
RyanZAG 14y ago
Wait, what? The whole premise is completely and utterly false? http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-ww-monthly-201112-201212 http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-ww-monthly-201112-20121... Android: 33% iOS: 23% That is a major difference in favor of Android. Why write a blog post without even checking the data?!
- smackfu 14y ago
  iOS still has a clear lead in North America.
  - RyanZAG 14y ago
    And Android has a clear lead in China, the biggest market. These stats also largely mirror the distribution of Android phone purchases. What's your point? http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-ww-monthly-201212-201301-map http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-ww-monthly-201212-20130... Worldwide, Android still leads by 10% in web browsing.
    - enraged_camel 14y ago
      As multiple people have pointed out, the reason Android "leads" by 10% in web browsing (especially in China) is because there are a ridiculous number of cheap Android phones out there, leading to a larger amount of total traffic from Android. To really understand what the OP is talking about, you need to think in terms of per capita browsing in iOS and Android. In other words, how much web browsing does your average iOS user do, vs your average Android user? That is really what matters.
  - calciphus 14y ago
    Based on whose stats?
- micheljansen 14y ago
  Yes, but those are absolute usage numbers. There is 1.43 times as much traffic coming from Android devices as there is from iOS. However, there are far more Android devices shipped than iOS devices, so they browse relatively less: http://www.asymco.com/2012/11/05/the-late-smartphone-adopter-paradox/ http://www.asymco.com/2012/11/05/the-late-smartphone-adopter... On top of that, the Statcounter numbers also include tablets, so smart phone only numbers would look very different. Android tablet usage is a fraction of iPad usage (source: stats of a European site with 100M+ monthly visitors). For smartphones, it's more like Android 35% iOS 57%.
micheljansen 14y ago
The average Android user may surf less than the average iPhone user, but there are also way more of them. There are loads of cheap low-end Android devices that are able to browse the internet, but the people who buy them are not so interested in that. Apple doesn't make low-end phones (although they do sell old models), so it is a much more conscious decision to spend that much money on a phone. I think that if you take out all the people who went to a store "just to buy a phone" and just include people who buy high end models like the Samsung Galaxy, Google Nexus etc. the browser usage picture is not that different from iPhone users.
- schraeds 14y ago
  So just to recap, there are more android phones and users out there but many of them just bought the cheapest phone, maybe the one the sales rep was pushing that week. iOS users are a vocal minority, using more data, browsing more sites, and paying for more apps. So, if you want to make money selling wares to mobile users, the choice seems pretty clear.
- byoung2 14y ago
  There are loads of cheap low-end Android devices that are able to browse the internet, but the people who buy them are not so interested in that Case in point: my wife and I both have Android phones, so when my mother in law needed a phone, we got her an Android too. She has not used the internet once on it, but we installed a few apps to make it easier for her to use (e.g. one app puts a picture of the last person who called on the home screen). We also set it up to dial out through Google Voice (total integration is best on Android, including replacing the dialer). I bet a large portion of Android users fall into this category.
rprasad 14y ago
I would argue that Android users generally have more important/interesting things to do than surfing on their phone all day.
- javis 14y ago
  Are you serious? Please, don't be serious. You're right, the majority of Android users are international business men, unlike those pesky iPhone users, who are all 12 year old girls playing Angry Birds 24/7.
- danielrm26 14y ago
  In case you're not trolling, why is it that the business class cabin of most flights is full of iPhone users? Why is it that most artists, journalists, photographers, etc. seem to lean heavily towards iOS? I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just asking what group you think it is that is highly busy/productive, on Android, and doesn't show up in web logs?
  - deleted 14y ago
    [deleted]
mtgx 14y ago
Here's the report he's talking about: http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2012/12/browser_stats_f_5.html http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2012/12/browser_stat... What does he find so strange about this? The chart counts all phone browser market shares. And Android's user base is not 5x that of iOS, if that's what he's implying. His article makes no sense, because the data he's talking about doesn't match at all his "conclusions". The 48% number is for smartphones only, meaning mostly just Android and iOS, as the others are very tiny market share. But it's not the whole phone market, as the first chart above shows. So he's mixing both, and concludes that "Android has half of the market, but only 24% browser share". Ugh, this post is a mess. Android has half the SMARTPHONE market, but has much less from the PHONE market. That's why it only has 24%, just like iOS in the PHONE market.
- RyanZAG 14y ago
  Why use old data? Use current data and argue a position from there. http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-ww-monthly-201112-201212 http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-ww-monthly-201112-20121... The Q3 data point is just before iOS and Android began to diverge dramatically.
ryanhuff 14y ago
As an Android user, I would guess that the most significant reason why Android users browse less may have more to do with conserving the battery than anything else. My experience with Android and the battery life has been miserable. My Nexus 4 seems better, though.
jack-r-abbit 14y ago
Android user here. I don't do a lot of surfing on my phone because I would rather use a larger screen. Using my wife's iPad or my Asus tablet is a little better but I still prefer to use my laptop when it is handy. So if I am out and about and really need to access the web, I do it. But when my laptop is just in the office... I use the laptop. I don't think the data is complete unless you also include whether or not these same people even have a computer anymore. Whether it is right or wrong, we keep being told that the desktop is dead... so maybe iOS users have bought into that idea more than Android users. If all you own is an iOS device.. you don't really have much choice of how you surf the web.

21 points by hisyam 14y ago

mtgx 14y ago

You failed to mention that the iOS Safari market share is the same as Android's, which makes sense considering they have about equal installed bases right now (although the Android one is growing much quicker).

drcube 14y ago

This is ridiculous, if I'm reading it right. For one thing, the carrier I currently use (AT&T), forces you to buy a data plan if you have a smartphone. I'd be surprised if this wasn't the case for all carriers. So that blows the conclusion out of the water. But why ask the question in the first place? Because the Android browser market share is so much lower than the Android market share as a whole? I would presume that "browser share" comes from the web, which can be accessed by all sorts of devices, and "mobile market share" comes just from mobile devices. That alone probably makes the question moot. But even if it didn't, there's Opera, Firefox, Chrome and all sorts of other browsers on Android that could make up the gap. In other words, I doubt the premise (Android users surf the web less) as well as the conclusion (this is due to most Android users being too price averse to use data). I just don't see any evidence of either.

thoughtsimple 14y ago
I have a data plan on an iPhone with AT&T and I pay an additional $15 over the standard 450 minute plan for 200 MB of data. I understand that AT&T has raised this minimum to $20 for 300 MB. That price won't break the bank for most people but 200-300 MB for a month of data isn't much. I'm generally on WiFi so I don't care but I suspect that many people would find this too small for comfort. If they don't care about surfing from the phone, I can see people just avoiding using any data at all so that they don't have to worry about additional fees.
- short_circut 14y ago
  That is exactly the reason I rarely use my phone for browsing. The internet is just too expensive.
- re_todd 14y ago
  I'm with AT&T and went to the $15/month a couple years ago (don't know if the price went up, I'm on someone else's contract and I've never actually seen the bill). It's a pain to worry about bandwidth, and video is out of the question. Yes, WiFi bandwidth is free, but sometimes I forget to turn on WiFi, then almost have a heart attack when I see how much bandwidth I've consumed (thanks to the "3G Watchdog" app). It's just significantly less stressful to put the android phone down on my desk and just surf on my desktop or laptop on my Cable connection.
dave1010uk 14y ago
1. These stats are worldwide. I believe the US phone market isn't very representative and most phone contracts sold last year did not come with lots of inclusive data. 2. These stats are just for mobile devices.

felipeko 14y ago

I'm not sure i agree with his reasons, mostly because what the data really shows is that Android users don't really browse on Wi-Fi [1] (on 3G the discrepancy - device marketshare vs browsing marketshare - is much lower). My opinion (with anecdotal evidence) is that Android users just stick with their PCs when at home (presumably when they have Wi-Fi), whereas iOS users prefer the small screen, for some reason. [1] http://blog.cloudfour.com/explaining-the-ios-and-android-mobile-disparity/ http://blog.cloudfour.com/explaining-the-ios-and-android-mob...

Tichy 14y ago
Seriously, they distinguish between mobile browser usage on Wi-Fi vs 3G? That doesn't make much sense, at least not if you wonder what device you should optimize for. Perhaps you could conclude that Wi-Fi surfers would tolerate bigger web sites, though.

danielrm26 14y ago

iOS user here, so bias acknowledged, but I am a mobile security guy and I get new phones quite often. Just last week I fired up the new Google Nexus device from LG and tried to spend a full week on it--for the purpose of being more familiar with Android as a user. I couldn't make it a full 24 hours. This was a fully stock Android experience, on the latest and greatest phone, and Chrome crashed six (6) times on me. Scrolling in the browser was markedly inferior. And the overall experience of reading on the device just felt far worse. I didn't want to read anything on it, honestly. I tried to account for my own bias towards iPhone/iOS, but I don't think it makes up even half of the bad experience I had. In short, I think Android phones discourage, from a UX standpoint, the activity of browsing. And I think that's a much larger factor than that mentioned in the original post.

ImprovedSilence 14y ago
I'm an Android user, and I agree completely with this. Browsing the web on Android is a painful experience.
- dquigley 14y ago
  I've personally had a different experience. (Background: I've had an iPhone 3GS and 4, HTC EVO 4G, a LG Optimus from Sprint and Virgin Mobile, some dirt cheap Android-based Samsung smartphone, and now the Samsung Galaxy Note II. All of these devices I've used for a minimum of multiple days Other than the stock browser on the Samsung Galaxy Note II (which is easily replaced by Google Chrome's mobile browser) I haven't had issues with any Android device browsing the web compared to an iPhone. In fact in my experience, I would without a doubt say Chrome has been a better experience than Safari. Google Chrome's integration with their desktop browser has been awesome since I use Google Chrome on all my desktops. But this is personal experience, and you can't really base all of this off personal experience. Second, if you're used to the iOS interface, switching to Android will be a big adjustment, one that if you only give it 24 hours you won't ever enjoy.
- mtgx 14y ago
  What does that even mean? Are you talking about the browser itself? About using a low-end Android phone?

jarcoal 14y ago

Android is the default OS, so naturally it picks up a lot of users that don't want to use all of it's core features. No surprises here.

RyanZAG 14y ago

Wait, what? The whole premise is completely and utterly false? http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-ww-monthly-201112-201212 http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-ww-monthly-201112-20121... Android: 33% iOS: 23% That is a major difference in favor of Android. Why write a blog post without even checking the data?!

smackfu 14y ago
iOS still has a clear lead in North America.
- RyanZAG 14y ago
  And Android has a clear lead in China, the biggest market. These stats also largely mirror the distribution of Android phone purchases. What's your point? http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-ww-monthly-201212-201301-map http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-ww-monthly-201212-20130... Worldwide, Android still leads by 10% in web browsing.
  - enraged_camel 14y ago
    As multiple people have pointed out, the reason Android "leads" by 10% in web browsing (especially in China) is because there are a ridiculous number of cheap Android phones out there, leading to a larger amount of total traffic from Android. To really understand what the OP is talking about, you need to think in terms of per capita browsing in iOS and Android. In other words, how much web browsing does your average iOS user do, vs your average Android user? That is really what matters.
- calciphus 14y ago
  Based on whose stats?
micheljansen 14y ago
Yes, but those are absolute usage numbers. There is 1.43 times as much traffic coming from Android devices as there is from iOS. However, there are far more Android devices shipped than iOS devices, so they browse relatively less: http://www.asymco.com/2012/11/05/the-late-smartphone-adopter-paradox/ http://www.asymco.com/2012/11/05/the-late-smartphone-adopter... On top of that, the Statcounter numbers also include tablets, so smart phone only numbers would look very different. Android tablet usage is a fraction of iPad usage (source: stats of a European site with 100M+ monthly visitors). For smartphones, it's more like Android 35% iOS 57%.

micheljansen 14y ago

The average Android user may surf less than the average iPhone user, but there are also way more of them. There are loads of cheap low-end Android devices that are able to browse the internet, but the people who buy them are not so interested in that. Apple doesn't make low-end phones (although they do sell old models), so it is a much more conscious decision to spend that much money on a phone. I think that if you take out all the people who went to a store "just to buy a phone" and just include people who buy high end models like the Samsung Galaxy, Google Nexus etc. the browser usage picture is not that different from iPhone users.

schraeds 14y ago
So just to recap, there are more android phones and users out there but many of them just bought the cheapest phone, maybe the one the sales rep was pushing that week. iOS users are a vocal minority, using more data, browsing more sites, and paying for more apps. So, if you want to make money selling wares to mobile users, the choice seems pretty clear.
byoung2 14y ago
There are loads of cheap low-end Android devices that are able to browse the internet, but the people who buy them are not so interested in that Case in point: my wife and I both have Android phones, so when my mother in law needed a phone, we got her an Android too. She has not used the internet once on it, but we installed a few apps to make it easier for her to use (e.g. one app puts a picture of the last person who called on the home screen). We also set it up to dial out through Google Voice (total integration is best on Android, including replacing the dialer). I bet a large portion of Android users fall into this category.

rprasad 14y ago

I would argue that Android users generally have more important/interesting things to do than surfing on their phone all day.

javis 14y ago
Are you serious? Please, don't be serious. You're right, the majority of Android users are international business men, unlike those pesky iPhone users, who are all 12 year old girls playing Angry Birds 24/7.
danielrm26 14y ago
In case you're not trolling, why is it that the business class cabin of most flights is full of iPhone users? Why is it that most artists, journalists, photographers, etc. seem to lean heavily towards iOS? I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just asking what group you think it is that is highly busy/productive, on Android, and doesn't show up in web logs?
- deleted 14y ago
  [deleted]

mtgx 14y ago

Here's the report he's talking about: http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2012/12/browser_stats_f_5.html http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2012/12/browser_stat... What does he find so strange about this? The chart counts all phone browser market shares. And Android's user base is not 5x that of iOS, if that's what he's implying. His article makes no sense, because the data he's talking about doesn't match at all his "conclusions". The 48% number is for smartphones only, meaning mostly just Android and iOS, as the others are very tiny market share. But it's not the whole phone market, as the first chart above shows. So he's mixing both, and concludes that "Android has half of the market, but only 24% browser share". Ugh, this post is a mess. Android has half the SMARTPHONE market, but has much less from the PHONE market. That's why it only has 24%, just like iOS in the PHONE market.

RyanZAG 14y ago
Why use old data? Use current data and argue a position from there. http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-ww-monthly-201112-201212 http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-ww-monthly-201112-20121... The Q3 data point is just before iOS and Android began to diverge dramatically.

ryanhuff 14y ago

As an Android user, I would guess that the most significant reason why Android users browse less may have more to do with conserving the battery than anything else. My experience with Android and the battery life has been miserable. My Nexus 4 seems better, though.

jack-r-abbit 14y ago

Android user here. I don't do a lot of surfing on my phone because I would rather use a larger screen. Using my wife's iPad or my Asus tablet is a little better but I still prefer to use my laptop when it is handy. So if I am out and about and really need to access the web, I do it. But when my laptop is just in the office... I use the laptop. I don't think the data is complete unless you also include whether or not these same people even have a computer anymore. Whether it is right or wrong, we keep being told that the desktop is dead... so maybe iOS users have bought into that idea more than Android users. If all you own is an iOS device.. you don't really have much choice of how you surf the web.