WebOS Web market share on the rise?
Daniel Rodriguez
Today AdMob put out a Mobile Metrics report that describes in detail, the different smartphone platforms Web market share. The graph shows tremendous growth in Apple's iPhone OS Web use but something amazing to us at Prethinking is the amount of growth WebOS has had. 
The first WebOS device was released with Sprint exclusivity on June 6, 2009. October 6th, 2009 will be WebOS's fourth month birthday. AdMob's study shows WebOS to actually be a noticeable blip on a huge map. Worldwide WebOS is already responsible 4% of mobile Web browsing traffic. Android which was released on October of 2008 and is already released in many other countries around the world has only 7% of the Web browsing market share, and Blackberry, being the largest smartphone distributor in the United States with many different models and an OS that has been out for quite some time now, only has 8% mobile Web market share.
It is clear that WebOS is a growing platform and it seems to have a really great start so far. After Palm's Europe releases and the release of their newly unveiled Palm Pixi this Web traffic brought to us by WebOS will grow even more. Perhaps passing Android and Blackberry Web market share by the end of this year? We're all excited to find out how this unfolds over the next few months.
Reader Comments (6)
I question the market share pie graph stats. Where did they come from? Not too long ago maybe beginning of the year RIM had first or second place in market share with palm being in third. There is no way that with the numbers of smartphones palm sold so far this year the dropped in market share drastically. Same for RIM though it is possible they went down a little but no way gone from like 30 or 40% to 5%. Perhaps I'm wrong but it seems suspect to me.
is it possible you are thinking of the U.S. Market? These graphs are based on WorldWide 'Browser' market share. Not the phone its self but its browser. Seeing as blackberry argueably has the worst browser in the history of browsers. I believe it :)
Here's a link to AdMob's PDF describing their findings in detail:
http://metrics.admob.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/09/AdMob-Mobile-Metrics-Aug-092.pdf
Dan: FANTASTIC article. Quite timely too, when moronic tech journalists and analysts claim the Pre is dying, based on very shaky or old data. Well done. Keep it up!!!
The charts are not labeled properly. These stats are based on mobile internet requests (and ad requests) per mobile OS. They do not represent actual percentage of handheld marketshare within the U.S. Basically what this states is that iPhone users generate 52% of mobile web requests while Blackberry generates 14% - this seems accurate given the fact that iPhone users surf the web more frequently than many other cell phone users. Also, don't forget that a majority of iPhone apps connect to the web, so I'm assuming that these numbers include any API calls coming from those apps.
When an iPhone user stops browsing, the session ends, and no more requests are made.
When a Palm Pre use stops browsing, the session continues, and the requests that AdMob is tracking continue to be made. Which creates a skewed and worthless stat. Who cares if your ad comes up when someone is working on something else.