Mon, 02/04/2013 – 11:23 by Amid all the hand wringing over Apple’s “impending decline,” it’s interesting to note new traffic metrics from
StatCounter that show Apple driving more mobile Internet traffic than any of its rivals. This is partly a product of the iPhone 5’s success during the holiday quarter.
The StatCounter data reflect mobile OEM market share based on actual Internet traffic. This stands in marked contrast to most smartphone and tablet market share estimates (from IDC, Gartner, comScore and others) that are based on shipments or consumer surveys. There are a few actual traffic measurements out there (e.g., Chitika) but not many.
That’s why StatCounter’s data (as a reflection of actual user behavior) are so interesting. Shipments is an inherently flawed metric that may or may not correspond to actual sales to end users.
The “headline” being used along with this new StatCounter OEM data is that Apple has overtaken Nokia as the company driving the most Web traffic on a global basis. Samsung is third. In the US Apple is much farther ahead of rivals, including Samsung. Nokia by comparison drives just over 3% of mobile Web traffic in the US market.
Top 10 Mobile Vendors (Global) 
Top 10 Mobile Vendors (US) 
It’s interesting to compare the above numbers to “mobile OS” and mobile browser figures from StatCounter. The vendor and OS numbers are essentially identical in Apple’s case, as they should be. The browser numbers are not. They suggest that roughly 10% of iOS users in the US market are using browsers other than Safari.
Top 10 Mobile Operating Systems (US) 
Top 10 Mobile Browsers (US) 
On a global basis the Android OS has a greater share of traffic in the aggregate than iOS: 37% to Apple’s 26%.
Top 10 Mobile Operating Systems (Global) 
It’s not clear to me whether StatCounter captures and includes apps in its traffic estimates — I believe it’s just conventional Web traffic. Regardless, traffic is a much better metric to discuss than handset or device shipments in terms of the influence and importance of the competing mobile platforms.
