It looks as if those reports announcing the end of the iPad era may have been a little premature after all. A study released yesterday by research firm comScore shows that Apple’s best-selling iPad accounts for no less than 97.3% of tablet browsing in the US. Worldwide the iPad is less dominant, notching up a slightly more modest 89% share.
The country with the highest tablet usage was Canada, where around 35% of non-PC traffic is consumed on slates. By comparison India had the lowest tablet usage of the countries studied with just 4.5%.
The study also examined smartphone traffic, and found that the iPhone still dominates in all markets except the US, Argentina and Chile. In fact, despite Android’s inroads in the smartphone market, in many countries iPhone traffic is around double that of Android – for example in the UK the iPhone has a share of 29.9% vs Android’s 15.1%. However Android has managed an impressive turnaround in America, and now leads the iPhone by around 12 points. You can expect to see this trend filter through to other locales as Android continues its march towards global dominance.
The only country not embracing Apple and Google products is India, where the iPhone and Android combined only accounted for 8.8%. This is most likely due to many consumers in India wanting dual-SIM phones.
The comScore study also took a look at the behaviour of smartphone and tablet users, and found that Android users consume far more data over cellular connections than their iOS-toting counterparts. Specifically, Android handset owners sip down around 78% of their data over cellular connections, compared to around 52% for iPhone users. The situation was similar for tablets, where Android users took roughly 35% of their data over 3G, whereas iPad owners consumed 92% of their data over WiFi.
This could be due to a number of factors. Android syncs more data that iOS depending on the number of Google services you are using (GMail, Calendar, Contacts etc.), and often performs these operations without users’ knowledge, regardless of the type of connection the device has. Android does not have to be synced to a PC to handle large app installs or backups, and also downloads system updates over-the-air. It will be interesting to re-visit this data once Apple’s iCloud service launches later this year, and see what effect sending and receiving all that data from the cloud has on iOS data usage.
