ComScore released its latest mobile subscriber market share report for November. What it shows is that Android continued to gain (3.1 share points vs. August). But so did the iPhone, likely powered by sales of the iPhone 4S. All other platforms lost ground.
Android handsets now represent nearly 47 percent of the US smartphone market, while the iPhone is just under 30 percent. The comScore data doesn’t reflect iPod Touch or iPad devices.
The firm also said that 39 percent of the US mobile population owned smartphones. This stands in contrast to Nielsen’s 44 percent estimate, which puts the actual number at more than 100 million people.
What’s perhaps most interesting, however, about the data in the report is the fact that it shows (I believe for the first time) more people used apps than used the mobile browser.
I found an article today on Tom’s Hardware that just made me think. Looking at how Google views their products, the adaptation of the world wide web, and more than that…Cost benefit analysis.
The obvious idea behind this move is Google’s interest in capturing those advertising revenues generated by Mozilla’s25 percent browser market share and users who are using the box for Google searches. Some rumors suggest that the price for Firefox went up as Microsoft was bidding for the space as well and Google certainly has no interest to handing those search revenues to Bing.
The problem, of course, is Firefox is a rival for Chrome is this respect as it is cheaper for Google to harvest search revenues through Chrome than pay Mozilla. As long as Mozilla has substantial market share that makes economic sense for Google, there is no reason to believe why Google would be dropping Mozilla. However, Chrome developer Peter Kasting does not quite agree and complained that people do not understand why Google is developing Chrome and why Google is supporting Firefox. According to Kasting, Chrome is much more Google’s donation to the world, a welfare project if you will, than a tool that generates revenues.
Kasting argues that “the primary goal of Chrome is to make the web advance as much and as quickly as possible. That’s it. It’s completely irrelevant to this goal whether Chrome actually gains tons of users or whether instead the web advances because the other browser vendors step up their game and produce far better browsers. Either way the web gets better. Job done. The end.”
To continue that thought, Mozilla also aims to make the web better. And since Chrome “cannot be all things to all people”, Google needs to fund Mozilla as Firefox “is an important product because it can be a different product with different design decisions and serve different users well.” Kasting concludes his thoughts with the notion that “Google succeeds (and makes money) when the web succeeds and people use it more to do everything they need to do.” One may wonder where all the advertising business fits into this argument, as Chrome is actually tied directly to advertising via its instant-search engine supported via the location bar.
This is one that I’m going to need to watch for market share of browser penetration. Yoono is a plug-in that has been available on Mozilla’s Firefox for years now. This is not a new technology in any way shape or form, I wonder if it will catch on?
Feel the need to be constantly connected to social media? RockMelt, a new Web browser, is targeting people who do. The RockMelt browser displays information from users’ news feeds, Twitter, and Facebook accounts on the sides of their browser window. Now people can chat with Facebook friends, post on their walls, or tweet without ever having to switch browser windows. A beta version of the RockMelt Web browser is already available on the company’s website, and it plans to release an iPhone app in the next few days (pending approval from Apple), according to a spokeswoman. The Wall Street Journal’s Katherine Boehret recently got her hands on the app. “RockMelt is well suited for use on the go,” she said, “but key elements of the browser are missing in the mobile app.”
