1. Introduction

Which devices really matter for your mobile strategy? Which platforms dominate your market? Just how long is the Long Tail of mobile devices in your industry? What impact will technologies such as HTML5, CSS3, Javascript, and AJAX have on your mobile strategy? Site or app, what is the right approach for your mobile use case and target audience? Netbiscuits, the world’s leading cloud software service for cross-platform mobile sites and apps, has opened its logs to answer these questions, and more, based on metrics generated from the 4.5 billion mobile pages that our mobile cloud software platform currently delivers to more than 2.900 different devices every month worldwide.

2. Methodology

Segmentation

One main aim of this document is to illustrate how many different devices actually make up the 100 percent of all mobile devices accessing a site on the web. To make these statistics more useful this report separates the “Dominating Few” from the “Long Tail” of devices as follows:

• Dominating Few: 5.00% or higher share of all devices accessing sites via Netbiscuits
• Long Tail: 4.99% or lower share of all devices accessing sites via Netbiscuits

Please note that this split differs from the percentile split between Dominating Few and Long Tail devices that were used in our last report, published in July 2010. We made this change, because the feedback we received indicated that the market perceived the “dominating devices” as those few with the greatest absolute share than those that make up for the first 50 percent of all devices accessing a site.

Data Generation

All data presented in this report was generated exclusively from web-enabled mobile devices that requested mobile websites delivered by Netbiscuits. Requests generated by bots, desktop browsers and mobile device emulators have intentionally been excluded to give a more realistic overview. The statistics presented in this report don’t necessarily reflect general market trends. They may contain inconsistent naming over time for single devices. These inconsistencies result the constant update of Netbiscuits’ device detection database. Around 50 new device profiles are added to this proprietary database on a monthly basis. Some device names are abbreviated for layout reasons. Please also note that the specific analysis on smartphones presented in this report does not include devices without cellular phone capability, such as the Apple iOS based iPod Touch media player and iPad media tablet.

Geographic Classification

In this report all geographic information regarding accessing devices is classified into eight regions described below. Content requests originating from Antarctica, French Southern Territories, Heard Island, McDonald Islands, South Georgia Islands and South Sandwich Islands as well as from anonymous proxies and satellite providers are not matched to any of the classified regions.

Asia-Pacific (developed): Australia, Hong Kong, Japan, Republic of Korea, Macau, Marshall Islands, Federated States of Micronesia, New Caledonia, New Zealand, Singapore, Taiwan

Asia-Pacific (developing): Afghanistan, American Samoa, Bangladesh, Bhutan, Brunei Darussalam, Cambodia, China, Christmas Island, Cocos (Keeling) Islands, Cook Islands, Fiji, French Polynesia, Guam, India, Indonesia, Kazakhstan, Kiribati, Democratic People's Republic of Korea, Kyrgyzstan, Lao People's Democratic Republic, Malaysia, Maldives, Mongolia, Myanmar, Nauru, Nepal, Niue, Norfolk Island, Northern Mariana Islands, Pakistan, Palau, Papua New Guinea, Philippines, Pitcairn, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Sri Lanka, Tajikistan, Thailand, Timor-Leste, Tokelau, Tonga, Turkmenistan, Tuvalu, Uzbekistan, Vanuatu, Vietnam, Wallis and Futuna

Eastern Europe: Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Belarus, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Bulgaria, Croatia, Czech Republic, Estonia, Georgia, Hungary, Kosovo, Latvia, Lithuania, Macedonia, Republic of Moldova, Montenegro, Poland, Romania, Russian Federation, Serbia, Slovakia, Slovenia, Turkey, Ukraine

Middle East and Northern Africa: Algeria, Bahrain, Egypt, Islamic Republic of Iran, Iraq, Israel, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libyan Arab Jamahiriya, Morocco, Oman, Palestinian Territory, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Sudan, Syrian Arab Republic, Tunisia, United Arab Emirates, Yemen

North America: Bahamas, Bermuda, Canada, Greenland, Saint Pierre and Miquelon, United States, Virgin Islands (U.S.)

South and Central America: Anguilla, Antigua and Barbuda, Argentina, Aruba, Barbados, Belize, Bolivia, Brazil, Cayman Islands, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Dominica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Falkland Islands (Malvinas), Grenada, Guadeloupe, Guatemala, Haiti, Honduras, Jamaica, Martinique, Mexico, Montserrat, Netherlands Antilles, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Puerto Rico, Saint Kitts and Nevis, Saint Lucia, Saint Vincent and the Grenadines, Suriname, Trinidad and Tobago, Turks and Caicos Islands, Uruguay, Venezuela, British Virgin Islands

Sub-Saharan Africa: Angola, Benin, Botswana, Burkina Faso, Burundi, Cameroon, Cape Verde, Central African Republic, Chad, Comoros, Congo, The Democratic Republic of the Congo, Cote D'Ivoire, Djibouti, Equatorial Guinea, Eritrea, Ethiopia, French Guiana, Gabon, Gambia, Ghana, Guinea, Guinea-Bissau, Guyana, Kenya, Lesotho, Liberia, Madagascar, Malawi, Mali, Mauritania, Mauritius, Mayotte, Mozambique, Namibia, Niger, Nigeria, Reunion, Rwanda, Saint Helena, Sao Tome and Principe, Senegal, Seychelles, Sierra Leone, Somalia, South Africa, Swaziland, United Republic of Tanzania, Togo, Uganda, Zambia, Zimbabwe

Western Europe: Aland Islands, Andorra, Austria, Belgium, Cyprus, Denmark, Faroe Islands, Finland, France, Germany, Gibraltar, Greece, Guernsey, Holy See (Vatican City State), Iceland, Ireland, Isle of Man, Italy, Jersey, Liechtenstein, Luxembourg, Malta, Monaco, Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, San Marino, Spain, Svalbard and Jan Mayen, Sweden, Switzerland, United Kingdom

4. Global Device Statistics

Netbiscuits stores the profiles of 6,000+ different web-enabled mobile devices from all over the world in its proprietary device detection database. Our advanced device recognition combined with our unique “Biscuits” technology, our powerful rich media conversion engines and our globally redundant server infrastructure allows us to optimize and deliver mobile websites to virtually any web-enabled mobile device on this planet.

Global Number Of Devices

The table below shows the number of different devices that requested mobile sites via Netbiscuits globally between May 2009 and November 2010. It separates this number into the Dominating Few (above 5 percent access share) and the Long Tail of devices (below 5 percent access share)

The figures show an average monthly number of 2,583 unique devices that requested mobile sites via Netbiscuits globally. From them an average number of only 2.5 devices made it across the 5 percent hurdle to become part of the dominated few. On the other hand, a stunning average of 2,588 unique devices accounted for the global mobile device Long Tail in the same period of time.

Global Access Share Of Devices

More interesting than the pure number of devices is the share that the Dominating Few devices made when accessing mobile sites via Netbiscuits compared to the share that the Long Tail of devices generated.

These figures indicate two trends: Even though generated by only two to three devices throughout the whole period of time, the share of the Dominating Few has grown significantly between May 2009 and November 2010 and levels off at around 40 percent today. One the other hand the figures show clearly that the Long Tail of devices always summed up to 60 percent and more during the whole period of time. So the largest number of mobile devices that are requesting mobile sites today rest within the Long Tail.

Global Dominating Few Devices

The table below shows the dominating devices that generated 5 or more percent of all site requests on Netbiscuits between May 2009 and November 2010 globally

Unsurprisingly, Apple devices still hold the pole positions all the time. While BlackBerry had still managed to be part of the top few in 2009, Apple pushed them aside completely in 2010. From a global perspective BlackBerry had become a Long Tail device manufacturer in May 2010 for Netbiscuits.

Global Device Long Tail

There is no clear way to list an average number of 2,588 unique mobile devices. However, to still give you an impression of our global device Long Tail the graph below illustrates the share of the top 40 devices that accessed mobile sites via Netbiscuits in November 2010.

In that month, the three dominating Apple devices accounted to 39.16 percent of all mobile website requests handled by Netbiscuits. The other 2,923 devices together generated 60.84 percent. Android-based handsets like the Motorola A855 and Samsungs GT-I 9000 were the strongest followers of Apple while BlackBerry had its first appearance in the list only at position six.

Global Smartphone Share

23.1 percent of the worldwide handset shipments during 2010 were smartphones. It’s no surprise to find Netbiscuits’ global mobile device metrics demonstrating a strong usage of smartphones, too, with Apple iOS, Google Android, Nokia Symbian (≥ S60) and RIM BBOS in the lead. Segmented by operating systems, the following graphic illustrates the share that the most relevant smartphone platforms generated on Netbiscuits in November 2010, globally.

Netbiscuits global devices stats prove that besides the Dominating Few, thousands of other mobile devices from many different manufacturers are used for accessing the web today. The same is true for smartphone platforms. Especially Android, already the dominating smartphone OS in North American (see next chapter), is used by many different handset manufacturers around the world. Furthermore, it can be expected that the share of Windows Phone OS will grow in 2011, now that Microsoft and Nokia are cooperating in the smartphone segment.

5. Regional Device Statistics

Regional Number Of Device & Access Share

Broken down into global regions, the number of devices and the traffic share generated by the Dominating Few and the Long Tail of devices differ greatly.Obviously the highest numbers of unique devices accessing our mobile publishing platform come from the most developed markets in Western Europe and North America while the lowest numbers come from Middle East Asia and Africa. Generally the number of devices accessing mobile sites grows with the level of development in a given market. Nevertheless, the figures for APAC developing and APAC developed seem to contradict this. An explanation might be that APAC developing is a by far bigger territory than APAC developed.

In all regions we find less than a hand full of Dominating Few devices. What’s really interesting is that North America, undoubtedly the most advanced mobile web market on the globe, provides the highest number in this category. Even though three of them are still based on iOS, this is another indicator that the undisputed dominance of Apple devices begins to crumble in its home market. Regarding the share of site requests transferred by the Dominating Few, our figures indicate a simple equation: Developed regions like Western Europe, Northern America and APAC developed with a higher penetration of smartphones show a relatively huge percentile share for the Dominating Few – between 36 and 44 percent in November 2010. On the contrary, regions that are less penetrated by smartphones show a much lower traffic share for the Dominating Few – down to only 7.60 percent in Sub-Saharan Africa generated by a Samsung device (SGH-E25, E256 Brasil, E250L).

We already learned that by far the highest number of devices accessing mobile sites belong to the Long Tail. More important than the actual number is the fact that in all regions around the globe these devices account for the lion’s share of website requests. No region has a Long Tail share lower than 55 percent. In Northern America the Long Tail actually accounted for more than 73 percent of all website requests transferred to Netbiscuits in November 2010.

Regional Smartphone Breakdown By Operating System

Four operating systems are currently dominating the smartphone market globally: Apple iOS, Google Android, Nokia Symbian and RIM BlackBerryOS. But the differences between regions are huge.

In six out of eight regions, Apple still provides the top 1 dominating device based on the number of website requests via Netbiscuits. Only in Middle East / Northern Africa and Sub-Saharan Africa other devices take the pole position. But if you take all devices into account – Dominating Few and Long Tail – the picture changes dramatically: In North America Google Android has taken over the pole position from Apple iOS. In fact, only in two regions – Western Europe and APAC developed – Apple was still the market leader in November 2010.

6. Device Statistics By Market

The impact of any device on traffic statistics varies dramatically by market. To give you an idea about this variation this chapter shows device data for Netbiscuits-based sites originating from the USA, UK, Germany and Australia. Again, all data refers to November 2010.

It is evident that the total numbers of unique devices accessing mobile sites via Netbiscuits in each of the four markets discussed above differ widely. The USA showed the widest distribution of devices (2,210), followed by the United Kingdom (1,818) and Germany (1,740) while Australia (1,213) showed significantly lower numbers of unique devices. The larger numbers for Dominating Few devices (4) can be found in the two most advanced mobile web markets, the USA and the UK while the market development in Germany and Australia is a little behind. These markets still only show three devices that manage to stand out the Long Tail and cross the 5 percent access share hurdle.

With regards to specific devices it is obvious that Apple took a great chunk within the top ten of the considered markets. iPhone devices with a firmware version of 2.2 and higher still headed the list in all four markets in November 2010. But again, the figures differ clearly between the more and the less developed mobile web markets: In Germany (53.61%) and Australia (46.77%) Apple iOS devices accounted for more or less the half of all website requests via Netbiscuits in November 2010. In the world’s leading mobile web markets the same devices only accounted for a site access share of 29.66 percent in the USA and 21.33 percent in the UK. Again these figures clearly show a trend to more devices besides the Apple iOS family that are heavily used for mobile web access.

7. HTML5 Capabilities Of Mobile Devices

HTML5 enables websites to have the user experience of a native application. This is why the mobile industry is talking so enthusiastically about HTML5 and its impact on the site versus app debate. Nevertheless, HTML5 has not been developed specifically for mobile. HTML5 is the next major revision of the HTML standard which has not been updated since December 1999. Like all previous versions of HTML it is designed to structure and present content on the web. It improves the inclusion and handling of multimedia and graphic content without the need for plug-ins and APIs.

For developers of web applications the biggest challenge with HTML5 is that it does not necessarily enable features or advantages across all platforms. It is a “standard in motion” that is implemented differently on many platforms. Due to the high level of fragmentation in our industry this is especially true for mobile platforms and devices

Even the organisations that are defining the HTML5 standard do not act consistently: In February 2011 the World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) announced that HTML5 will be advanced to “Last Call” status in May 2011 to be able to release a full specification by 2014. Just three weeks before the Web Hypertext Application Technology Work Group (WHATWG) moved HTML5 “to a new development model where the technology is not versioned but defined in a living document as it evolves.”

The graphic above illustrates a quick check on the HTML5 capabilities of devices based on Apple iOS 4, Google Android 2.2 and BlackBerry OS6. Out of a maximum score of 300 the results show that HTML5 is still far from being common even on some of the most advanced mobile platforms. Other platforms like Windows Phone and Symbian S60 typically score in the low two-digit range.

For this report we decided to take a deeper look and investigate the HTML5 capabilities of the top 15 mobile devices from various different markets, including the US, the UK and Germany. The top lists are based on device data from Q4 2010. Our tests were conducted using html5test.com and findmebyIP.com which both provide popular browser support checks for a wide subset of technologies commonly referred to by the term HTML5.

Please note that this subset partly differs from the “official” HTML5 specification as it also includes other technologies such as CSS3. In fact it describes more accurately what our industry summarizes by the term HTML5. So we decided to include CSS3 capabilities into our test and evaluated the following capabilities:

• Extended Video Support featuring the newly introduced video element
• Extended Audio Support featuring the newly introduced audio element
• Extended Form Concept including new form input types, input element attributes, etc.
• Miscellaneous new Element Types and Attributes including section and grouping elements
• Extended User Interaction Concepts enabling native drag & drop and undo history functionality
• Microdata enabling semantic annotation of content with labels
• 2D Animation Rendering enabling 2D animations based on the new canvas element
• CSS3 in General indicating the level of support regarding features and concepts introduced with CSS3
• CSS3 Selectors indicating the level of support regarding the CSS3 Selector concept
• Geolocation API being an interface that provides access to the devices current location based on GPS data, GSM/CDMA cell IDs, network signals and alike
• FileReader API facilitating file access to the devices underlying file system
• Offline Web Application Support enabling users to continue interacting with web applications and documents even when their network connection is unavailable
• Webstorage being an extension of the Offline Web Application support by allowing to actively store key/value pairs on the client side
• IndexedDB extending the Webstorage concept providing a complete client-side database
• Local Devices Support enabling access to connected devices (e.g. USB devices) based on the device element
• 3D Animation Rendering (WebGL) for creating 3D animations with the HTML5 canvas element
• Web Workers providing and API for running background scripts in the context of the browser, but independent of user interface scripts

According to the test sites used, the following tables show if the HTML5 feature subsets mentioned above are supported , partially supported , or not supported by the top 15 devices in a given market. Tests which did not find a result are denoted with a question mark.

The overall number of missing results differs widely across the five markets examined. In Germany only seven tests didn’t produce a result. This number was significantly higher for the UK (29) and the USA (35) and nearly doubled again for Malaysia (53) and Australia (57). Therefore, conclusions regarding the HTML5-readyness of a given market should only be taken very carefully.

Conclusions

With regards to HTML5, this report demonstrates that this new technology is far from being the answer to all questions and challenges facing mobile web application developers today. HTML5 is a welcome addition to the mobile party, but it does not negate device and OS fragmentation. Consequently, mobile application developers cannot solely rely on HTML5 technology to implement rich UI features across multiple mobile devices. This fact is true not only for the Long Tail of devices but also for the top mobile devices in the world’s most important markets for mobile applications, today.

With regards to smartphone OS, this report showed that the dominating role that Apple iOS played in many markets in the western hemisphere throughout the last couple of years is beginning to crumble heavily. Google Android has already taken over the lead in the US and other markets are likely to follow. The trend towards a growing number of relevant smartphone platforms can be found on all levels, globally, regionally and also locally. With regards to Dominating Few versus Long Tail devices, this report proves that besides the Dominating Few, thousands of other mobile devices from many different manufacturers are used for accessing the web today. Based on the number of website requests Long Tail devices account for 60 percent or more in any given market. So the largest number of mobile devices that are requesting mobile sites today rest within the Long Tail.

As a consequence it is obvious that optimizing mobile sites only for the few devices or operating systems that dominate a market only leads to locking out the vast majority of all web-enabled handsets – and their users – from your content and services. A sustainable mobile strategy, set up to maximize reach and revenue, will therefore make sure that your content and services are delivered to and optimized for all mobile devices in your market.

To ensure the best possible user experience on any mobile device accessing your web content and services, you cannot solely rely on HTML5 technologies. You should take advantage of Netbiscuits’ feature-rich, enterprise-class mobile development and publishing platform which empowers you to provide your customers with the best user experience on any mobile device in your market.