Android on the rise on page loads

Over the past year Finland’s and the world’s leading supplier of mobile service measurement and analytics technology CEM4Mobile Solutions, previously (QAim Oy), has been studying trends in the market share of different mobile operating systems, measured as page loads for Nordic content services. The results show extremely strong growth for Android. The research was also used to forecast future trends, predicting that Android will have taken over as the most popular mobile platform by next summer.

The research was carried out by analysing over 58 million mobile page loads for Nordic content services between week 4 and week 41 of this year. The research shows actual mobile traffic. This data is essential when developing mobile services or making decisions on optimising investment in different technologies, for example. Furthermore, the results of the research can also shed light on how different mobile platforms encourage the use of mobile services and affect the amount of user activity.

According to the research, the proportion of mobile page loads for the different operating systems between weeks 4 and 41 2010 were as follows:

“The results show an extremely strong increase for Android. On page loads, Android overtook SonyEricsson in week 21 at the end of May and the Nokia Series 20 – 40 operating systems in week 27 in early July,” says CEM4Mobile managing director Janne Aalto who carried out the research. “Android shows a strong rise in popularity among active users of mobile services,” Aalto continues.

 Forecast: Android to overtake the iPhone in May and Symbian in August 2011

A forecast was made of development in the use of different mobile platforms based on the trend in page loads over the past 14 weeks, in other words page loads for weeks 28 – 41. The average percentage changes for this period are as follows:

If this trend continues unchanged, when it comes to popularity among users of mobile services, Android looks set to overtake the iPhone OS in May 2011 and Symbian at the end of August 2011.

“Over the period studied the page loads for mobile services grew by 102%. This explosive growth in the use of mobile services has slowed the decline in popularity of older operating systems and in the autumn, for example, Symbian’s share even increased slightly due to new Symbian handsets on the market. It will be interesting to see the effect of Nokia’s new handsets on the Symbian trend and the effect of tablets on the market share of Android and the iPhone OS,” says Aalto.

Graph: Change in market share of mobile operating systems weeks 4 – 41 2010 based on page hits for Nordic content services

Graph: Forecast change in market share of mobile operating systems between week 42/2010 and week 41/2011