Most popular mobile OS in SA: October 2011
In early November 2011, Google unveiled results of a survey conducted by Ipsos GmbH in association with TNS Infratest and the Mobile Marketing Association on global smartphone usage and marketing trends.
Findings were broken down by country, and among other things they revealed that the most popular smartphone operating system (OS) in South Africa was BlackBerry (44%), followed by Symbian (15%), Windows Mobile (9%), Android (8%), and iOS (4%).
With StatCounter and Google Analytics also providing data on mobile OS and browser usage, it is interesting to look at which platforms generate the most website page views and compare those numbers to the new survey stats.
StatCounter is a web analytics company that measures web trends by counting page views.
According to its October 2011 stats, mobile browsers accounted for 6.55% of all page views globally. In South Africa mobile page views were somewhat higher at 10.22%.
The table below shows the percentage of page views each mobile platform generated. The column labelled “MyBroadband” is derived from Google Analytics statistics and not StatCounter, and is included for the sake of interest.
| Mobile OS usage by page views: October 2011 | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Operating System | Worldwide | South Africa | MyBroadband |
| SymbianOS | 29.84% | 57.56% | 2.45% |
| Samsung | 5.22% | 9.36% | 0.18% |
| Unknown | 6.01% | 8.61% | – |
| iOS | 23.48% | 8.17% | 78.66% |
| Android | 22.11% | 7.36% | 12.45% |
| BlackBerry | 9.49% | 4.20% | 4.71% |
| Sony Ericsson | 2.04% | 2.91% | – |
| WinCE | – | 0.82% | – |
| PlayStation | 0.29% | – | – |
| Other | 1.53% | 1.02% | 1.55% |
Worldwide mobile OS stats: StatCounter, October 2011
South Africa mobile OS stats: StatCounter, October 2011
It is interesting to note that StatCounter places Symbian as the top page view generating mobile platform not just in South Africa, but in the world.
Comparing the StatCounter numbers to the findings of the Ipsos study seems to indicate that either Symbian users browse a lot more than other smartphone users, or certain Symbian devices were excluded from the definition of “smartphone.”
This wouldn’t be too far-fetched as the S40 version of Symbian is widely considered a “feature phone” platform and not a smartphone OS.
To see how MyBroadband users compared to the rest of the country we pulled statistics on mobile device usage from Google Analytics – a feature introduced fairly recently.
Of all the visits to MyBroadband, 3.39% were from a mobile device, which accounted for 2.37% of all page views.
| MyBroadband mobile OS stats: October 2011 | ||
|---|---|---|
| Mobile OS | Visits | Page views |
| iPad | 56.16% | 70.25% |
| Android | 16.31% | 12.45% |
| iPhone | 12.41% | 7.87% |
| BlackBerry | 7.79% | 4.71% |
| SymbianOS | 3.86% | 2.45% |
| Nokia | 1.99% | 1.34% |
| iPod | 0.90% | 0.54% |
| Samsung | 0.26% | 0.18% |
| Windows | 0.17% | 0.11% |
| Sony | 0.13% | 0.08% |
| LG | 0.02% | 0.02% |
| MOT | 0% | 0.00% |
It’s interesting that Google opts to count the iPad, iPhone, and iPod separately in its mobile OS section.
When combined, iOS devices make up a massive 78.66% of the overall mobile page views on MyBroadband, which form 69.47% of the visits from a mobile device to the site.
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