Report: Android dominates global mobile Web browsing, but iOS owns key Western countries

Analysts claim that the mobile platform war is over — or at least the battle is no longer so intense. Most of us are aware that Apple tends to be more dominant in Western markets — due to the premium cost of its devices — while Android has greater distribution in emerging markets thanks to a wider variation of products, which are available for lower prices.

But beyond the sales data, what are people actually using? Mobile technology firm dotMobi has taken a shot at visualizing the world based on device browsing rather than just sales figures.

The company — which offers a range of mobile-specific services, including publishing, developer and domain tools — sifted through “billions of mobile site views” on its goMobi mobile publishing platform to provide insight into the most popular mobile platforms in 101 countries.

The data is based on pageviews from devices — black represents countries where iOS dominates mobile browsing, green is for Android, and grey areas are places not included in the dataset.

Unfortunately, dotMobi isn’t able to provide an overall figure for combined global data nor a summary of traffic based on the sheer volume, but it does say that iOS devices dominate browsing in 34 countries, while Android is the leader in the remaining 67 nations that it tracks. Importantly, though, iOS maintains the lead in key Western markets like the US, UK, Canada, France and Japan.

Is there any hope for other ecosystems? In a word, no.

Lesser platforms are only ‘winning’ in two markets, and even in those places they are far from dominant. BlackBerry is the most popular platform for mobile browsing in South Africa — with 39 percent — while Nokia is top in Bangladesh, with 26 percent of mobile Web traffic.

Instead, a strong duopoly has developed in most countries, particularly those in North America and Europe. That trend is exemplified by the US, where Android and iOS combined are responsible for 97 percent of Web browsing, according to dotMobi.

We’ve included the full data for iOS and Android below. The findings don’t throw any curve-balls, but it is always useful to know how devices are being used, rather than merely comparing device sale or activation data.

Headline image via etnyk / Flickr