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Posted in Main on November 30th, 2010 by Pingdom
Where do you think Apple s iPhone is the most popular? Where does Nokia s
Symbian phones
dominate? How is it going for Android in different parts of the world? What
about Blackberry?
We re going to answer all of those questions and more in this article, which
will closely examine
mobile OS usage across the world.
To put together this report, we have used mobile web usage statistics from
StatCounter. The
numbers are from the month of October 2010 and will therefore give you an
up-to-date picture of
the situation.
Worldwide mobile OS usage at a glance
Since these statistics are based on mobile web usage, the numbers won t
necessarily match the
exact market share based on physical handsets, but rather the handsets that
people use to access
the Web.
Note, the iOS numbers in this article include the iPhone and iPod Touch, but
NOT the iPad.
There are a couple of things to note here:
When looking at mobile web usage, the different parts of the world are led by
either iOS
or Symbian. Apple s iOS leads mobile web usage in North America, Europe and
Oceania, while Nokia s Symbian leads in Africa, Asia and South America.
Worldwide, Symbian leads the pack. This is not surprising considering Nokia
is the
world s largest maker of mobile phones. After Symbian comes iOS, Blackberry,
Android,
Sony Ericsson and Samsung, in that order.
Symbian s weakest position by far is in North America.
Blackberry s strongest region is North America, but it is still behind iOS
there.
Android might be growing fast, but it s still far from dominating any part of
the world.
You may also wonder about Palm s webOS (now owned by HP), but it hardly made a
dent in
the overall web usage so we didn t include it. Perhaps the situation will
change in the future, but
for now it remains very much a niche mobile OS.
WinCE is pretty much universally dead. Windows Mobile reaches a couple of
percent in a few
countries, but that s about it. We ll see what happens with Microsoft s Windows
Phone 7.
Top countries per mobile OS
Now that we have established how mobile usage differs across the world, let us
have a closer
look at exactly where each mobile OS has the strongest presence.
The mobile OS market share (based on mobile web usage) is shown next to each
country in the
lists below.
Top countries for iOS
Apple s iOS is the leading mobile OS in 30 countries. We found 21 countries
where more than
half the mobile web traffic came from iPhone or iPod Touch. As we already
mentioned, the
mobile OS stats in this survey does not include the iPad.
1. Canada, 83.7%
2. Cuba, 77.2%
3. Switzerland, 76.7%
4. Australia, 72.5%
5. Ireland, 69.7%
6. New Zealand, 69.0%
7. France, 67.4%
8. Singapore, 64.6%
9. Denmark, 64.3%
10. Sweden, 61.6%
Barely outside this list are Japan (61.4%) and Belgium (61.2%). For those
interested, and since
it s Apple s home country, the United States came in at 35.2%.
Top countries for Android
We found only one country where Android accounts for more than 50% of the
mobile web
traffic, which is also the only country where Android is the leading mobile OS.
1. South Korea, 78.3%
2. Austria, 27.3%
3. Taiwan, 26.5%
4. Denmark, 25.3%
5. Slovenia, 24.0%
6. United States, 23.3%
7. Netherlands, 21.7%
8. Sweden, 21.3%
9. Estonia, 16.8%
10. Norway, 16.0%
Note that South Korea is the home country of Samsung, and their Android phones
have clearly
been very successful there. This means that the Samsung stats we show later are
not entirely fair
to Samsung, since some of it has clearly been swallowed up by the Android
stats.
Top countries for Blackberry
Blackberry is the leading mobile OS in four countries, and tied with iOS in a
fifth (the United
Kingdom). Only one country had more than half of its mobile web traffic coming
from
Blackberry (see below).
1. Dominican Republic, 57.1%
2. Guatemala, 45.4%
3. United Kingdom, 40.4%
4. Colombia, 38.9%
5. El Salvador, 37.54%
6. United States, 32.0%
7. Indonesia, 31.7%
8. Saudi Arabia, 30.6%
9. Panama, 29.2%
10. Jamaica, 18.8%
Interesting enough, considering RIM is a Canadian company, it isn t all that
strong in its native
Canada, where it accounts for a mere 3.6% of the country s mobile web traffic.
Top countries for Symbian
Symbian is the leading mobile OS in more than 100 countries. We found more than
75 countries
where it accounts for half or more of the mobile web traffic.
1. Chad, 94.0%
2. Libya, 93.9%
3. Sudan, 92.9%
4. Iraq, 90.1%
5. Oman, 88.3%
6. Jordan, 87.1%
7. Egypt, 86.6%
8. Somalia, 85.2%
9. Mozambique, 84.4%
10. Paraguay, 83.9%
This is of course very much in line with our findings last week regarding the
amount of mobile
web usage across the world. Nokia s more affordable Symbian-based phones tend
to be the most
widely used phones in developing nations.
An interesting side note is that Nokia has almost no foothold in the US market.
Symbian makes
up a mere 1.36% of mobile web usage in the United States.
Top countries for Sony Ericsson
We found only one country where Sony Ericsson was the leader, Bolivia.
1. Bolivia, 42.3%
2. Malaysia, 35.3%
3. Honduras, 30.9%
4. Uruguay, 30.6%
5. Costa Rica, 26.7%
6. Cambodia, 26.6%
7. Sri Lanka, 26.2%
8. Sierra Leone, 26.0%
9. Belarus, 23.8%
10. Poland, 22.6%
Interesting enough, Sweden is supposed to be kind of a home market for Sony
Ericsson (it s the
birthplace for the Ericsson part of Sony Ericsson), but it only makes up 7.6%
of the country s
mobile web usage. Instead, Sweden s mobile web usage is dominated by iOS and
Android.
Admittedly, some Sony Ericsson phones will be using Android (they ve recently
started selling
Android phones), but still...
Top countries for Samsung
It should be noted that this list would probably be topped by South Korea if we
judged solely by
the Samsung brand. However, as we pointed out earlier, Samsung has largely been
using
Android lately.
1. Namibia, 20.3%
2. Gabon, 17.9%
3. Guinea, 17.4%
4. Swaziland, 12.7%
5. Cameroon, 12.2%
6. Congo, 11.4%
7. South Africa, 11.3%
8. Burundi, 10.5%
9. Botswana, 10.5%
10. Zambia, 10.1%
And since it s so huge, we ll mention that India comes in at number 11 with
9.5%.
A few additional observations
Here is a selection of things we thought were interesting about the mobile OS
country statistics:
The United States is present in two of the top lists, the top 10 for
Blackberry and for
Android, but it s not even close to breaching the top 10 for iOS.
Canada, in spite of being RIM s home market, isn t on the top 10 countries
for
Blackberry. Instead, it s the number one country for iOS.
The iOS and Android top lists have two countries in common, both
Scandinavian:
Denmark and Sweden.
Android is incredibly popular in South Korea. We presume this is thanks to
Samsung,
which is Korean and has released several Android-based phones.
Blackberry actually has a stronger presence in the United Kingdom than it
does in the
United States.
On a side note, we were happy to see Sweden make two of these lists. As you may
know, we
here at Pingdom are Swedes.
Final words
It s worth mentioning once again that this is market share based on web
traffic, not number of
units. That said, it still gives us some very interesting mobile market data
that would be close to
impossible to come over any other way.
When examining these numbers and especially the chart, you could be forgiven
for thinking that
Apple and Nokia have split the mobile world between them. That would of course
be a bit
simplistic, but it can t be denied that Symbian phones completely dominate
large parts of the
world, while the iPhone and iPod Touch together seem to have carved out a very
strong place
alongside the giant that is Nokia.
Data source: StatCounter Global Stats.
A note on the country top lists: We didn t include the very smallest countries
(there are
countries with populations counted in the thousands instead of millions) when
we made the
country top lists per mobile OS. We did this partly because they realistically
represent such a
tiny share of the market, and partly because it s easy to get anomalous results
since
StatCounter s sample base will be very small for those countries. The worldwide
and regional
numbers, however, include all countries.