Local mobile browser markets: US

It’s instructive to take a good look at some local mobile browser market stats, as always by StatCounter. Today we treat the US.

The US is rather like the UK, except that BlackBerry is way less important. In the US, Safari is just above 50% market share, and it’s been holding there for quite a while.

Android WebKit is on the decline, like in the UK, but it had a better US position from the start. Here, too, we see Chrome eating into Android WebKit’s share, and here, too, we have to wonder if this is Chrome 30 from Google or Chrome 18 from Samsung.

BlackBerry went from 1 to 4%. This is not because it suddenly saw an upsurge in device sales, but because StatCounter corrected an error. It assigned too many BlackBerry visits that come over the BlackBerry network to Canada, while a significant amount actually originates from the US. Correcting this mistake saw BlackBerry use “quadruple” in a month.

Like in the UK, Opera has a tiny market share because US consumers are not interested in proxy browsers. The developed-nation-low-share pattern holds here.

IE is only at 1% instead of the UK’s 3, which I explain by the unpopularity of Nokia in the US. It still has residual brand awareness in Europe, but has never had any brand to speak of in the US, so not many people switched from Symbian to Windows Phone.

Again, UC is present but not thriving on the US market. I wonder which people use it. Proxy browser users? Android users? Americans of Chinese extraction? I can’t tell.

Mobile browser stats for the United States
Browser Q3 2013 ch Q2 2013 ch Q1 2013 ch Q4 2012
Safari 53% -1 54% +1 53% +2 51%
Android 32% -3 35% -2 37% -2 39%
Chrome 6% +2 4% +2 2% +1 1%
BlackBerry 4% +3 1% -1 2% 0 2%
Opera 2% +1 1% 0 1% 0 1%
IE 1% 0 1% 0 1% 0 1%
UC 1% -1 2% 0 2% 0 2%
Other 1% -1 2% 0 2% -1 3%
Volatility 6% 3% 3%
Mobile 15% +2 13% -1 14% +2 12%

Other countries in this series: Nigeria | India | Indonesia | South Korea | UK

This is the blog of Peter-Paul Koch, web developer, consultant, and trainer. You can also follow him on Twitter or Mastodon.
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