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Mobile browser shares Q1 2011, part 1/2

It’s past time we took a look at the Q1 mobile browser market shares in the twelve countries I selected back in January. Although there are no huge movements towards or away from certain browsers, a few trends we saw in the Q4 2010 figures continue, and a few new trends may be taking off.

Overview

The countries are Brazil, China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Mexico, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Poland, South Korea, the UK, and the US.

We’ll go through the countries by relative size of the mobile web: thus we’ll start with Nigeria, where 31% of all websites hits come from a mobile browser, and end with Poland, where that figure is only 1%. This entry treats the first six countries.

Methodological notes are at the end of this entry.

Nigeria

In Nigeria we see the well-known Opera/Nokia pattern, with Opera being the dominant browser (because Opera Mini is about the cheapest way of getting the web onto your phone), and Nokia as a distant second. In the last quarter Opera grew even more dominant, winning 7% from the other browsers.

Mobile web growth as a whole was 4% in Nigeria: decent growth, but incomparable to the 14% growth of last quarter.

All in all the mobile web in Nigeria is doing fine, and Opera is doing fine because of that.

India

India pretty much shows the same picture as Nigeria. Opera is the largest browser, Nokia comes second, and mobile web use gew by 4%. Opera is slightly less overwhelmingly dominant that in Nigeria.

Just like last quarter, India has the lowest volatilty: only 2% of the market changed hands. It thus remains the mos static of the twelve countries I selected.

BTW: Android is about to break through the 1% threshold. I expect to show it in next quarter’s India table.

Indonesia

Remarkably, the market share of the mobile browsers relative to all browsers declined by 2% in Indonesia. It is the only of my twelve countries where that happened, and I’m not sure why.

Market leaders Opera and BlackBerry lose ground to the other browsers, although the BlackBerry share remains huge, with only the UK exceeding Indonesia here.

Incidentally, it could be that part of this BlackBerry share is actually caused by fake BlackBerrys, which are very popular in Indonesia. I have no idea what kind of browser they use, but it can’t be much worse than the old BlackBerry browser.

US

Where BlackBerry still held the number 2 spot in the US last quarter, this quarter it has decisively dropped to the number 3 spot, losing 9 points in the process. This is the highest loss of any browser in my twelve countries.

Simultaneously both Safari and Android won market share. Thus the trend of the last two quarters is reversed for Safari and BlackBerry, while Android continues its victory march.

UK

In the UK BlackBerry also lost market share, though not nearly as much as in the US. Still, the simultaneous rise of Safari made BlackBerry lose its sole number 1 spot. Here, too, Android is still on the rise. So the pattern is the same as in the US, although the actual numbers differ somehwat.

Also, the mobile browser market share as a whole grew 1% in the UK, putting it at the same 6% as the US. Not that the market grew by 20% this quarter; there are plenty of statistical artifacts due to rounding with these small figures. Still, the mobile web is becoming more important in the UK, too.

South Korea

South Korea continues on the course it set last quarter. Android is the overwhelming number 1 browser here, due to the success of the Samsung line of Android phones in its home country.

Safari continues to lose ground, and Nokia and Opera have disappeared below the 1% threshold. The odd thing remains that Samsung bada has negligible market share in South Korea. Is Samsung pushing it in the rest of the world, but not its home market? That would be odd. Still, the numbers allow for no other explanation.

Methodology

I use StatCounter as a source.

1. I took the Mobile Browsers bar graph for Q1 2011 in the twelve countries.
2. I ignored all browsers that had less than one full percentage point of market share, as well as StatCounter’s Other category.
3. I added the iPhone and iPod Touch entries to come to the Safari share.
4. I took the percentages and rounded them to the nearest whole point.
5. That gave me the current browser market share which I show in the table.
6. I gave my Other category all points that were still missing from the 100.
7. I repeated this procedure for Mobile vs. Desktop in the relevant period and the comparison period to get the Mobile browsing total and change.
8. I took the Q4 2010 numbers from my previous stat reports.

In the next entry we’ll treat the other six countries.