Mobile Browsers in 2010

As we talked about in The Google Beast we attempt to focus our time around the 80 - 20 rule. These rules do change over time, but here is a prime example of that theory in practice. On a look of mobile viewer on one of our large sites we broke it down too 5 players in this market.

The Numbers

We had over the last 30 days around 1,824 viewers who surfed the site. Of that group 1,600 used an apple device (e.g. 87%). 110 users (6%) used an Android based device. Only 69 users were on BlackBerry a small 3%, which was some what surprising to me. The last group each at less than 2% were Windows, PalmOS, and/or some other mobile device.

The Results

With this knowledge we have to ask ourselves so what does this mean? Basically how can we use the 80-20 rule? Both Android and mobile Safari are WebKit based browsers. This means we have a very robust device, which can use some very robust JS libraries, and CSS3, etc. So between Android, and iphone we have around 94% of the market.

Will the website look odd on a blackberry, maybe, but if we can grab 94% of the web, make it look very nice, then perhaps we can ignore the others. Or provide a simple view for that last 6%? Our friends at Aumnia , really are doing some very advanced techniques to deal with mobile websites. If you want to learn more check out their site.

The Numbers

Apple - 1,600 - 87.7%
Android - 110 - 6%
BlackBerry - 69 - 3.7%
Windows - 13 - 0.7%
PalmOS - 6 - 0.3%
Other - 26 - 1.4%