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.
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.
Published with Blogger-droid v1.6.9
No comments:
Post a Comment