The Myth Of Fingerprints

Are iPhone users the most active web surfers on smartphones? Two reports, from The Daily Mail and British Gas, say that the majority, by a factor of four, of visitors to their websites "are on an iPhone". The National Lottery recently used similar figures to justify their iPhone-only stance too and a report from Intelligent Environments, while showing that there were more Android devices than iPhones in the UK, admittedly by a slim margin, evidenced that iPhone customers are the heaviest smartphone users with 18% of iPhone users spending more than four hours on their phone each day, compared with just 4% of Android and BlackBerry users.

Now this just doesn't make sense. Given that the figures for the number or iPhone and Android users are level-pegging both in the UK and globally, why are iPhone users surfing websites four times as much as all other smartphone users? Web fixation? Surely there's an app for that?

So I did a little digging in the web stats fingerprint files of a site I run including for the Aston Martin Owners Club, a site with very respectable traffic figures and a predominance of iPhone users in its audience. Turns out my own Galaxy S, until the recent upgrade to Gingerbread, showed in web stats as a non-smartphone, which would explain why sites offering iPhone optimised sites serve me up non-smartphone versions of their site. Looking further at the site stats it became apparent the Android users were just a tad behind the iPhone users at 2.10% and 2.11% respectively.

In addition, Google's Chrome browser shows up in web stats as a webkit, read iPhone, user agent. This means anyone surfing to a website from a PC, laptop or netbook using Chrome is going to show in many webstats as an iPhone.

I also found that by typing in about:useragent to the browser's URL bar on my Galaxy S I could select from a range of user agent options; from native Android, in my case Galaxy S, to iPhone, Nexus 1 and desktop agent, the latter mimicking a PC browser. Not all Android users would do this but it does point to the earlier evidence that Android phones are showing up in web site stats inconsistently at best.

Clearly this needs more investigation and I've posted a question on Quora about this but it does look as though the figures being quoted by British Gas and The Daily Mail may not be as indicative of the smartphone audience for their sites as they presume.

With many companies being led up the garden path to the iPhone's walled garden it's time for some pruning of the statistics orchard so that they can see the Android's for the Apples.

Over the mountain 
Down in the valley 
Lives a former talk-show host 
Everybody knows his name 
He says there's no doubt about it 
It was the myth of fingerprints 
I've seen them all and man 
They're all the same

Paul Simon - All Around The World or The Myth Of Fingerprints.

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Websites: the new bloatware

I have been doing all my browsing on mobile phones lately and it has made me realise just how bloated websites have become. Although most smartphone browsers can cope with pages that are not optimised for mobile phones and zoom in on content features, the sheer amount of page furniture on the average web page today makes those pages slow to load and confusing to navigate.

Some of this bloat is due to bad design: poor information architecture, overly large images, needless use of Flash or animated images and sound and simply loading too much on one page. Much of the bloat comes from online advertising, which usually features all of these bad design "features". All of these things point to a fundamental misunderstanding of what the web is and how to leverage it most effectively.

I first discovered the internet in one its first incarnations as JANET, the Joint Academic NETwork that is still operational in the UK. This was in the "green screen" days before Berners-Lee had devised the World Wide Web to give us a graphical way of navigating the wealth of content that was already out there. This mine of information was freely available and freely shared, something that enabled me to research papers for the software engineering post-graduate diploma I was studying at the time, empowering me with access to knowledge and advice that was invaluable.

I can still remember when Mixmaster Morris showed me the nascent world wide web on his computer back in 198? Although it was nothing much more than a graphical file management and reading system it certainly sped up the task of searching and navigating through all that content underlining the fundamental aspect of the internet that people so misunderstand, that it is a service, not merely another incarnation of print and audio-visual media. Much of the bloat on current websites stems from this fundamental misunderstanding, attempting to deliver either a televisual experience or push content at people when the web is an information medium that is pulled down by the end user according to their needs.

As more and more businesses develop a mobile presence for their enterprise, understanding of this fundamental difference will determine whether their mobile strategy is successful or not.

If you are contemplating implementing a mobile service, whether via a mobile web site or app and are interested in learning more about how you can ensure you adopt the right approach please contact me via the form below for consultation and advice.