iOS users more likely to use 3rd party browsers than Android users

The browser war on the desktop is very heated, but in the mobile space things are pretty calm – the overwhelming majority of Android and iOS users use the default browser on their device.

Here’s something you might not have expected though – Chitika, an ad network and data analytics firm, found out that iOS users are more likely to install and use a 3rd party browser than Android users.

A hair over 91% of Android users stick with the Android stock Browser that comes as part of the OS. The number of iOS users who use Safari is “only” 85%. These numbers come from Chitika‘s ad network, measuring a week of US and Canada web traffic.

Apple limits third-party browsers on its iOS platform – basically, they have to use Safari’s rendering engine and a slower version of Safari’s JavaScript engine (it’s the same engine, but third-party apps don’t get to use JIT).

So, almost all third-party browsers on iOS are just repackaged Safari with a different UI and some extra features (the exceptions being mostly Opera Mini-likew compression browser, which render the sites on a remote server) and yet 15% of iOS owners would rather have that than pure Safari.

Chitika found something else that’s quite interesting – of the 15% share of third-party browsers on iOS, only Chrome has a significant share (at 3%) and the other 12% are split between many different browsers, none of which has any statistically significant share.

On Android, however, only the big names have a measurable share. Surprisingly, Opera is the biggest non-default browser on Android, with Chrome having only half its share. The third player, with barely over half a percent share is Firefox.

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