September was a curious month for Apple: as everyone waited for the iPhone 5 and the iPad mini, the company lost quite a lot of mobile traffic market share, dropping below the 60 percent mark. Yet the company managed to rebound in October, surpassing 65 percent of the mobile traffic pie once again.
The latest data comes from Chitika, which comes up with its market share reports using millions of mobile ad impressions in the US and Canada. The last one showed that Apple’s iPhone 5 quickly overtook Samsung’s Galaxy S III in mobile Web traffic.
The iPhone 5’s gains of course contributed to Apple’s gains in October. Chitika said two months ago that it expected the device to only push Apple’s usage share even higher, and I agreed, but it turned out that many people sold their iPhones and Apple saw a huge loss in September before October’s gains.
In any case, the only two companies to see growth between September and October were Apple, up 5.96 percentage points (from 59.42 percent to 65.38 percent) and RIM, up 1.29 percentage points (from 0.22 percent to 1.51 percent). Apple’s gains can be attributed to a new device launch, but RIM’s gains are surprising (Chitika says it saw a big uptick in browsing on the Playbook).
Everyone else lost share. Samsung lost 2.42 percentage points (from 14.28 percen to 11.86 percent), HTC tumbled 1.47 percentage points (from 7.45 percent to 5.98 percent), Motorola fell 0.48 percentage points (from 5.11 percent to 4.63 percent), and LG fell 1.60 percentage points (from 4.65 percent to 3.05 percent).
All the other shares can be considered insignificant last month: Google, Huawei, ZTE, and the Other category. The news isn’t good for HTC, Motorola, and LG, which all saw new devices released in September.
Chitika expects Google to gain significant mobile traffic before the end of the year thanks to the new Nexus line of products announced last week, and I agree. The company also expects RIM to hang on to its minor share, which is a prediction that is harder to gauge. Yet there’s a big hole missing in the analysis that I think is worth underlining: I think the the iPad mini will help Apple gain mobile traffic share in November and even through December.
Image credit: Haseeb Iqbal
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