Local mobile browser markets: Egypt

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

Egypt used to be a Nokia/Opera country, with both proxy browsers holding about one third of the market. That’s changing now. Android use is surging (remember: these are cheap Androids; and not Samsung Galaxies), and the browser stats reflect that.

What’s curious here is that Opera Mini also exists for Android. So either the new Android users are slightly wealthier than average and can afford not to use a proxy browser, or Android is taking over way more of the device market than the browser stats show, but a significant number of users continues to use Opera Mini.

Nokia is holding in place, which means that whatever devices the Android ones are replacing, it’s not cheap Nokias like the Asha line. The fact that IE has entered the market strengthens the hypothesis that Nokia remains fairly strong in Egypt.

Then follow three mid-sized browsers: Safari, UC, and Chrome. Safari use is low compared to developed nations, which shows price is important in Egypt (well, DUH!). UC is stalling after some growth.

Combined, the proxy browsers (Nokia, Opera, UC) have gone from 68% to 56% in a year. That means the Egyptian market is slowly tilting towards more expensive devices and/or contracts. Let’s see how this trend proceeds in the next few quarters.

Chrome, now ... In earlier parts of this series I used to add a disclaimer that the Chrome share was probably mostly Samsung Galaxy S4s, which use Chrome 18 as a default browser. However, my recent discovery of pre-installed Chromes on other Android devices makes me doubt that conclusion. Right now I won’t make any statement about Chrome, except for the obvious one that its market share is growing.

BlackBerry and NetFront hold on to a sliver of the market, and so does Firefox. As far as I know no Firefox OS devices are on sale in Egypt, so it must be Firefox for Android. 1% is not huge, but it’s a lot better than 0.

Q4 2012 mobile browser stats for Egypt
Browser Q3 2013 ch Q2 2013 ch Q1 2013 ch Q4 2012
Nokia 27% 0 27% -2 29% -2 31%
Android 26% +3 23% +1 22% +5 17%
Opera 23% -4 27% -2 29% -5 34%
Safari 9% +1 8% 0 8% +2 6%
UC 6% 0 6% +2 4% +1 3%
Chrome 4% +1 3% +1 2% +1 1%
BlackBerry 1% 0 1% -1 2% 0 2%
Firefox 1% 0 1% 0 1% 0 1%
IE 1% +1 - - - - -
NetFront 1% 0 1% 0 1% 0 1%
Other 1% -2 3% +1 2% -2 4%
Volatility 6% 5% 9%
Mobile 9% +1 8% +1 7% +1 6%

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

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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