Today, John Gruber posted details on the top 10 operating systems used by visitors to Daring Fireball over the
past month as reported by Google Analytics. He was impressed to see 5.85% of visits from people using an iPad, considering that the device has only been shipping for six weeks and still isn’t available outside the U.S. It was also interesting to see the low percentage of Android visitors (0.21%) and even lower percentage of BlackBerry visitors (0.05%). Gruber speculates that most BlackBerry users do not use the web very much because the screen size is so small and the browser on the BlackBerry is so poor. I agree with that assessment. But isn't the Android supposed to have a nice screen and a superior web browser?
Gruber admitted that his site has a focus that encourages users of Apple products to visit the site, but I still thought it was interesting to see statistics from a site that gets well over 3 million visitors a month. Moreover, Gruber compares the traffic sources on Daring Fireball to other popular websites that have a different focus. For all of those sites, traffic for the iPad was far more than the Android even though the iPad has not been out very long.
To provide one more point of comparison, here are the similar numbers for iPhone J.D. Keep in mind that my traffic is far smaller than Daring Fireball and this site is far more focused on a particular interest (um, that would be the iPhone) than Daring Fireball, but with those caveats in mind, here are the operating systems that I saw on iPhone J.D. from April 18 to May 18:
| OS | Percentage |
|---|---|
| Windows | 55.98 |
| Macintosh | 26.30 |
| iPhone | 13.17 |
| iPad | 2.55 |
| iPod | 0.76 |
| Linux | 0.62 |
| Android | 0.29 |
| (not set) | 0.20 |
| BlackBerry | 0.08 |
| SunOS | 0.01 |
If you find it easier to comprehend a picture than a table, here is the same info in a pie chart. Windows is blue, Mac is green, iPhone is orange and iPad is the larger yellow slice:
Because of the iPhone focus here, you would not expect to see much traffic from other smartphones, but note that the ranking of operating systems here is very similar to what Gruber (and others) saw on their websites, with the obvious exception that most iPhone J.D. visitors use Windows computers —no surprise considering that most lawyers use Windows, at least in their offices.
[UPDATE: I had hoped to see other sites follow Gruber's lead, and now I see that Josh Barrett at Tablet Legal has done so. It comes as no surprise that iPad traffic there is almost 20%.]
I've always considered the excellent ability to access the web to be a major advantage of the iPhone, and now the iPad. The numbers cited by Daring Fireball, much like mine, seem to provide some anecdotal support to the notion that accessing the Internet is such a good experience on the iPhone / iPad and thus folks using an iPhone / iPad access the web far more often than users of other smartphones and other mobile devices.
And no, I still don't have an iPad myself, but I did get another chance to play with one this past weekend. I have not yet decided how an iPad would fit into my life, but I cannot deny how cool the device is.
