Posted in: Android, iOS, Mobile software, Web Browsers

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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