Opera is the top mobile browser - not!

By Stephen Withers
Wednesday, 03 June 2009 04:26

Opinion and Analysis

Opera is the leading mobile browser, claims StatCounter. But that's not backed up by the numbers the company presents.

According to StatCounter's Global Stats report for May, "Opera is the world's number one mobile browser, overtaking iPhone in May".

Opera took a 24.6 percent browser share, compared with 22.3 percent for the iPhone.

But hang on a minute - StatCounter is comparing statistics for a browser with those for a device. The company has aggregated the numbers for Opera running on Windows Mobile, S60 and UIQ, and compared them with Safari running only on the iPhone.

If you similarly aggregate the iPhone and iPod touch numbers, you get 37.2 percent and realise that the Apple handheld devices are still leaving the rest in the dust when it comes to web use.

Aodhan Cullen, CEO and founder of StatCounter, said "Opera began the year in number one slot but iPhone overtook it in February. May saw Opera regain the number one position," but failed to acknowledge that he was comparing apples and oranges.

Even so, these figures are at odds with those from Net Applications' Market Share report, which gives the iPhone OS almost 65 percent of mobile browsing.

Since Opera Mobile isn't available for the iPhone/iPod touch (Apple won't allow into the App Store any software that substantially duplicates built-in functionality), there's no way of interpreting the Net Applications figures consistently with those from StatCounter.

Even if you assumed that every mobile user capable of running Opera does so, the biggest share you can derive from Net Applications' numbers is about 13 percent - just over a third of the iPhone's share.

But if you look at StatCounter's breakdown by platform, you'll see that on May 31 Symbian took a 42 percent share and iPhone OS 35 percent - a close reversal of the figures for May 1.

Even that's only about half of Net Applications' number. So what gives? Find out on page 2.