iPad and Android Web Traffic Share

Wednesday, 19 May 2010

As reported by Google Analytics, here are the top 10 operating systems used by visitors to Daring Fireball over the past month (April 18 – May 18):

OS	Visits	Percentage
Macintosh	2,030,073	63.02
Windows	587,707	18.24
iPhone	313,549	9.73
iPad	188,379	5.85
Linux	53,069	1.65
iPod	31,760	0.99
Android	6,886	0.21
(not set)	6,699	0.21
BlackBerry	1,680	0.05
SymbianOS	400	0.01

Here’s a pie chart of the results, lazily cropped from Google Analytics’ web site.

5.85 percent of visits for the iPad isn’t bad for a device that’s only been shipping for six weeks and still isn’t available outside the U.S. If I change the date range to sample only the past two weeks, the iPad’s percentage increases to 6.78%. And over the weekend — this past Saturday and Sunday — the iPad’s percentage was 9.16%.

As ever when I post web traffic statistics from Daring Fireball, it’s worth noting that DF’s audience is certainly not representative of the web at large, or even the technically-oriented web at large. But other sites have posted their visitors’ OS breakdowns recently, and the iPad’s results are impressive.

For the month of April at TechCrunch, the iPhone accounted for 5 percent of visits, iPad 1.18, and Android 0.99.

For the month ending May 10 at Business Insider, the iPhone accounted for 5 percent of visits, the iPad 1.1. (No results for Android were listed.)

Lastly, Tim Bray last week posted a graph of browser user agents visiting his weblog since December. That’s not quite the same thing as a breakdown by OS, and he lumped the iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPad together as “iPhone”, so it’s impossible to judge the iPad’s share specifically. But even on his site, Android barely registered a blip on the chart.

I’m not sure how Android’s relatively low share of web traffic jibes with NPD’s report last week that Android phones outsold the iPhone last quarter. BlackBerrys are still the best-selling smartphones in the U.S., and their web presence rounds down to zero, so it’s certainly possible that Android users are more like BlackBerry users than iPhone users. But I always assumed that the reason BlackBerrys had such a small web presence is that RIM’s web browser was so crummy, and the screen sizes so small. Android phones have iPhone-size displays and a very good WebKit-based browser.

It’s also the case that this last quarter was the first one with phones like the Motorola Droid and Nexus One available, and the first with Verizon on board as a U.S. Android carrier. So, one might think, it makes sense that the iPhone still dominates Android in web visits, as the iPhone has been a popular device in the U.S. since July 2007. But then why has the iPad — only on sale for six weeks, only in the U.S. — already surpassed Android? I don’t get it.