Mobile Web Report 2018 I OPERATING SYSTEMS I FEATURE PHONES I RAM I BOTS
Mobile Web Report 2018
INTRODUCTION
DeviceAtlas tracks web traffic from hundreds of thousands of partner websites using device detection
platform for web optimization, segmentation, and analytics. This allows us to analyze the current state of
the mobile web by sharing some exciting statistics about the most popular smartphones used today.
In the Q1 2018 edition of the Mobile Web Intelligence Report we focused on:
• Mobile Operating Systems - who's winning (Android v iOS)
• Feature Phones - are they making a comeback?
• RAM - are 4GB devices increasing in popularity?
• Bots - the most active & the most helpful.
Notes on methodology
All statistics in this report are based on device usage data pulled from DeviceAtlas, a device detection
solution. DeviceAtlas works by parsing User-Agent strings which are looked up in the device description
repository that includes over 49,700 unique entries. The report offers just a glimpse into what’s possible
with DeviceAtlas. See the mobile analytics demo to get a better idea.
Mobile Web Report 2018 OPERATING SYSTEMS
Having recently examined the perennial iOS v Android battle for market share in 2017, our data from Q1 2018 tells a similar tale. iOS dominates in predominantly English-speaking countries, as well as Japan. In Sweden, it has a slender 2% lead over its Android equivalent. Android enjoys a clear gap in the majority of other countries in our data, caused in part by the abundance and diversity of reasonably priced Android powered devices.
Our look into 2017 v 2016 OS data gave us some insight into the shifting marketplace, and how
Android/iOS devices were increasing in popularity in some countries, but declining elsewhere.
Comparing that data to Q1 2018 also provides some interesting insights:
- Both iOS and Android lost market share in India.
- iOS made strong gains in Colombia, Egypt and Ireland.
Country iOS Share Q1 2018 vs 2017
Canada 56.9% +3.9%
Colombia 24.4% +8.4%
Egypt 28.6% +10.6%
France 40.8% -1.2%
India 9.6% -1.4%
Ireland 53.8% +4.8%
Malaysia 15.2% -13.8%
Country Android Share Q1 2018 vs 2017
Colombia 74.4% -7.6%
Egypt 70.2% -8.8%
India 71.6% -11.4%
Ireland 45.7% -4.3%
Malaysia 84.6% +13.6%
Spain 73.8% -4.2%
USA 39.3% -3.7%
Mobile Web Report 2018 FEATURE PHONES
As we see in the above charts, both iOS and Android lost market share in India. In a country of over 1.3 billion people, a few percentage points can make a huge difference to a manufacturers bottom line. The natural conclusion is another OS eating into their market dominance, and our data reflects this. The new entrant - KaiOS - has already overtaken iOS as the second most used OS in India. With 15% of total traffic, it beats Apple devices into third (with 9.6%).
Elsewhere, feature phones are still an active part of most countries mobile ecosystem, but have yet to
make as impressive an impact as in India.
Year of Release
When we dug into the Q1 numbers, we paid particular attention to "Year of Release", one of 168
properties available through DeviceAtlas. Feature phones released in 2011 accounted for 13% of all such devices registered in our data. As the chart below shows, there is a sweet spot from 2008-2012 - could this period have been the zenith of the feature phone?
Overall Feature Phone Traffic
When we look at raw visits from feature phones based on year of release, we see a slightly different
scene - phones released in 2005 (including the Nokia 6230i and N70) drove 6.6% of total traffic.
Phones released in 2017 accounted for almost 90% of our data, so the performance of their 2005
counterparts is more impressive than the percentage alone implies.
The volume of traffic for 2017 can be attributed to India, and the success of recent feature phone
launches. Top in our list was the Lyf/Jio range of KaiOS-powered handsets. Reliance Jio, India's third
largest operator with over 160 million subscribers, have in recent months taken the tariff war to the
next level, and as a result their branded devices dominate the feature phone landscape. They
account for over 88% of this data set.
Operating Systems
Given a feature phone's hardware restrictions, it's no surprise to see them running different
operating systems. A modern version of iOS of Android require functionality and power beyond the
reach of feature phones as we know them. Finding a balance, and offering as much as is reasonably
possible, is key.
We looked at some of the more common feature phone OS's in use today.
KaiOS is a Linux based OS that seeks to bring "smartphone-like functionalities to affordable
phones". Offering a range of apps through the KaiStore, the most notable devices to run Kai are the
revamped Nokia banana phone (8110) and the range of Jio/Lyf handsets mentioned above. Recently
announced partnerships with the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Google, AT&T and T-Mobile ensure a
healthy future for the FirefoxOS fork.
Nokia are synonymous with feature phones. They're responsible for the first camera phone sold in
the US, and also made headway in the areas of mobile TV and gaming. Their latest OS version,
dubbed Asha, is one of many variations they've used over the last two decades. "Nokia OS" can be
considered an unbrella term for many variations, encompassing the entire family of Nokia mobile
operating systems. Their more recent releases (they're now owned by Microsoft) have featured
Windows or Android software.
Originally conceived as an OS for the PDA variety of devices in the late 90's, Symbian accounted for
37.6% of all smart mobile devices sold in 2010. Apple were at a mere 15.7% that year.
However, the Android/iOS explosion hit the OS hard. As a result, Nokia, who were its primary
supporters, stopped supporting Symbian development in 2014.
Brew is an ancronym for Binary Runtime Environment for Wireless - an application dev platform,
created by Qualcomm. It's still used in some form by manufacturers such as Huawei, LG, Samsung
and HTC.
Another acronym, REX is a Real-Time Executive Operating System.
Mobile Web Report 2018 RAM
When comparing mobile RAM statistics for Q1 2018, we also had a look at the data for Q1 2017 to gauge the overall trend. What we saw was a clear move away from devices with 1024MB RAM in favour of 2048MB.
This happened in all but three countries in our data - Brazil, Argentina and Colombia.
In some countries the shift was quite dramatic. In Japan, for example, the most popular RAM for Q1 2018 was 2048, with 48% of overall hits. Last year, 1024 accounted for almost 60% of total traffic, now down to 16%.
In the UK, 2048 more than doubled its presence (18% in 2017, now 40%) while 1024 was reduced from 51% to 17.5% as people upgraded their devices. An even bigger shift was seen in the US, where 1024 enjoyed 51% of 2017's traffic, but now accounts for a mere 14%.
The charts below show the share for the most popular RAM specs.
Mobile Web Report 2018 BOTS
The most active crawler is not Google
When we analysed Q1 2018 data with a focus on non-human traffic and visits, we were a little
surprised to see BingPreview at the top of the list.
With just under 10% of total hits, Bing's page snapshot tool acts in a similar fashion to the
second placed bot, Facebookexternalhit, by crawling pages for preview elsewhere.
With 8.5% of total traffic, Facebook's page preview crawler has also been busy, scraping*
meta-data and images to enable seamless and visually appealing sharing on the platform.
When a Facebook user pastes a link, they quickly crawl the target page and pull information
such as title, description and preview/featured images:
*Given Facebook's ongoing PR fire, and the never-ending dance between their elusive T&Cs and privacy activists,
perhaps "scraping" isn't the most sensitive term to use.
What about Google?
Given its dominance in all things search, it may be surprising to see Google so far down the list
for Q1 2018 - Googlebot (mobile) was 5th, with 5.5% of total hits. The desktop equivalent was way
down in 13th with 1.6%.
However, if you've developed the most intelligent, efficient web-crawling and indexing system
the planet has ever seen, as well as the most popular free analytics package, you might not need
to crawl every site quite as often as your competitors.
That said, we did spot 102 variations of Google crawlers and bots in our data. Given Google's
integration with the wider web - think AMP, Structured Data etc - there are numerous reasons
why a Googlebot would visit your site.
Yahoo!
What we see in our data for Yahoo is similar, but on a lesser scale to Google. There is one main
crawler - Yahoo! Slurp - and 8 variations, all with different jobs to perform as they navigate the
Internet.
Unlike Google, Yahoo doesn't appear to have a dedicated mobile web crawler, certainly not one
operating at the same scale. Given Google's recent push to the mobile-first index, it's not surprising.
Yahoo's crawlers account for 2.6% of the total bot traffic included.
Others
With 5% of the overall traffic, Sogou Spider is the 6th busiest bot on the list. It's the web crawler
for Beijing-based search technology provider, Sogou.com.
ScoutJet, the web crawler for IBM's Watson, clocks in with 1.7% of the total, while another
Chinese search engine, so.com, is visible at 2.2% with its 360Spider bot.
DeviceAtlas Mobile Web Intelligence Report May 2018
Android vs iOS - ROBOTS USER-AGENTS
Below is a list of the most common bots and web-crawlers we saw on our network in Q1 2018.
Bot Name Type User Agent
BingPreview Preview/Fetch Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/534+ (KHTML, like Gecko) BingPreview/1.0b
Facebookexternalhit Preview/Fetch facebookexternalhit/1.1 (+http://www.facebook.com/externalhit_uatext.php)
Bingbot Search/Desktop Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; bingbot/2.0; +http://www.bing.com/bingbot.htm)
Bingbot Search/Mobile Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 7_0 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/537.51.1 (KHTML, like Gecko)
Version/7.0 Mobile/11A465 Safari/9537.53 (compatible; bingbot/2.0
Googlebot Search/Mobile Mozilla/5.0 (Linux; Android 6.0.1; Nexus 5X Build/MMB29P) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko)
Chrome/41.0.2272.96 Mobile Safari/537.36
Sogou Spider Search/Desktop Sogou web spider/4.0(+http://www.sogou.com/docs/help/webmasters.htm#07)
Facebookexternalhit Preview/Fetch facebookexternalhit/1.1
AdsBot Google Advertising AdsBot-Google (+http://www.google.com/adsbot.html)
Googlebot Search/Image Googlebot-Image/1.0
Yahoo! Slurp Search/Desktop Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; Yahoo! Slurp; http://help.yahoo.com/help/us/ysearch/slurp)
360Spider Search/Desktop Mozilla/5.0 (Windows NT 6.1; WOW64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko)
Chrome/50.0.2661.102 Safari/537.36; 360Spider
ScoutJet Search/Desktop Mozilla/5.0 (compatible; ScoutJet; +http://www.scoutjet.com/)
Googlebot Search/Desktop Mozilla/5.0 AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko; Google Web Preview Analytics)
Chrome/41.0.2272.118 Safari/537.36
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