Do androids dream of electric sheep?
Android, the mobile phone operating system developed by Google has become the single most popular phone OS on the market.
According to the market survey for the end of 2010, Google's Android now powers 33% of the world's smart phones. In achieving this figure it has now overtaken Symbian, the operating system used by Nokia, which has 31% market share. The other major players are Apple with its iPhone which claims 16% market share, and Blackberry devices which claim 14%.
The end of 2010 also saw smart phone shipments outstripping PC shipments for the first time. There was a staggering 100.9 million smart phones shipped in the final quarter of 2010 compared to 92.1 million PCs. This means the smart phone market grew by 87%, compared to a 5.5% increase in PC sales over the same period.
On the desktop, Internet Explorer's share of the browser market continues to slide, and is now down to 56%, which is, nevertheless, still impressive. Firefox remains at a solid 22%. Google's Chrome continues to rise in popularity and is now used by around 10% of desktop users on a global basis, whilst Apple users (about 5% of the market) almost universally use Safari which is built on the same rendering engine as Chrome.
Firefox, Chrome, Safari and Opera all tend to show good compliance with modern standards and users of those products tend to mostly use the later versions. However, the 56% market share of Explorer is split across users of IE6, 7 and 8, all of which have differences in the way they render websites, and version 9 is in the wings for release in the next few months. Microsoft's Internet Explorer used to lead the flock. Now it is playing catch up.
For web developers, this means we need to be increasingly aware that more and more our websites are being viewed on small screens, and factors like readability, simple standards-compliant interfaces and ease of use are more important than ever. Our site visitors will be viewing sites using modern standards compliant browsers like Chrome and Firefox. The days when people could design for a standard screen size and Internet Explorer's quirks are long gone.
28th February 2011
This article comes from the SKILLZONE email newsletter, published monthly since January 2008, and covering topics related to technology and the internet. All articles and artwork in the SKILLZONE newsletter are orignal content.