iOS user here, so bias acknowledged, but I am a mobile security guy and I get new phones quite often.<p>Just last week I fired up the new Google Nexus device from LG and tried to spend a full week on it--for the purpose of being more familiar with Android as a user.<p>I couldn't make it a full 24 hours.<p>This was a fully stock Android experience, on the latest and greatest phone, and Chrome crashed six (6) times on me. Scrolling in the browser was markedly inferior. And the overall experience of reading on the device just felt far worse.<p>I didn't want to read anything on it, honestly. I tried to account for my own bias towards iPhone/iOS, but I don't think it makes up even half of the bad experience I had.<p>In short, I think Android phones discourage, from a UX standpoint, the activity of browsing. And I think that's a much larger factor than that mentioned in the original post.
This is ridiculous, if I'm reading it right.<p>For one thing, the carrier I currently use (AT&T), forces you to buy a data plan if you have a smartphone. I'd be surprised if this wasn't the case for all carriers. So that blows the conclusion out of the water.<p>But why ask the question in the first place? Because the Android browser market share is so much lower than the Android market share as a whole? I would presume that "browser share" comes from the web, which can be accessed by all sorts of devices, and "mobile market share" comes just from mobile devices. That alone probably makes the question moot. But even if it didn't, there's Opera, Firefox, Chrome and all sorts of other browsers on Android that could make up the gap.<p>In other words, I doubt the premise (Android users surf the web less) as well as the conclusion (this is due to most Android users being too price averse to use data). I just don't see any evidence of either.
The average Android user may surf less than the average iPhone user, but there are also way more of them. There are loads of cheap low-end Android devices that are able to browse the internet, but the people who buy them are not so interested in that. Apple doesn't make low-end phones (although they do sell old models), so it is a much more conscious decision to spend that much money on a phone. I think that if you take out all the people who went to a store "just to buy a phone" and just include people who buy high end models like the Samsung Galaxy, Google Nexus etc. the browser usage picture is not that different from iPhone users.
As an Android user, I would guess that the most significant reason why Android users browse less may have more to do with conserving the battery than anything else. My experience with Android and the battery life has been miserable. My Nexus 4 seems better, though.
Wait, what? The whole premise is completely and utterly false?<p><a href="http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-ww-monthly-201112-201212" rel="nofollow">http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-ww-monthly-201112-20121...</a><p>Android: 33%
iOS: 23%<p>That is a major difference in favor of Android. Why write a blog post without even checking the data?!
You failed to mention that the iOS Safari market share is the same as Android's, which makes sense considering they have about equal installed bases right now (although the Android one is growing much quicker).
I'm not sure i agree with his reasons, mostly because what the data really shows is that Android users don't really browse on Wi-Fi [1] (on 3G the discrepancy - device marketshare vs browsing marketshare - is much lower).<p>My opinion (with anecdotal evidence) is that Android users just stick with their PCs when at home (presumably when they have Wi-Fi), whereas iOS users prefer the small screen, for some reason.<p>[1] <a href="http://blog.cloudfour.com/explaining-the-ios-and-android-mobile-disparity/" rel="nofollow">http://blog.cloudfour.com/explaining-the-ios-and-android-mob...</a>
Android user here. I don't do a lot of surfing on my phone because I would rather use a larger screen. Using my wife's iPad or my Asus tablet is a little better but I still prefer to use my laptop when it is handy. So if I am out and about and really need to access the web, I do it. But when my laptop is just in the office... I use the laptop.<p>I don't think the data is complete unless you also include whether or not these same people even have a computer anymore. Whether it is right or wrong, we keep being told that the desktop is dead... so maybe iOS users have bought into that idea more than Android users. If all you own is an iOS device.. you don't really have much choice of how you surf the web.
Here's the report he's talking about:<p><a href="http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2012/12/browser_stats_f_5.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2012/12/browser_stat...</a><p>What does he find so strange about this? The chart counts all phone browser market shares. And Android's user base is not 5x that of iOS, if that's what he's implying.<p>His article makes no sense, because the data he's talking about doesn't match at all his "conclusions". The 48% number is for <i>smartphones only</i>, meaning mostly just Android and iOS, as the others are very tiny market share. But it's not the whole phone market, as the first chart above shows. So he's mixing both, and concludes that "Android has half of the market, but only 24% browser share". Ugh, this post is a mess.<p>Android has half the SMARTPHONE market, but has much less from the PHONE market. That's why it only has 24%, just like iOS in the PHONE market.