DF traffic survey: total domination for Apple in mobile sector

The Dalton Firth traffic survey covers 1.4 million hits from 160,000 IP uniques over a 16-week window

Apple last night unveiled spectacular quarterly results, both in terms of profit and revenue.  Since my company has access to a reasonable sample of traffic data I thought I'd take a look at the proportion of traffic from Apple devices hitting sites we administer, and the results are surprising.

With the disclaimer that I only have access to data from a particular genre of website, namely current affairs and contemporary statistics (noting my traffic is nearly all from UK-based IP addresses) the data shows:

• 93.7% of mobile and tablet traffic is from an Apple device (iPod, iPad or iPhone) as of late September 2010
• Android-powered devices are failing to dent the Apple dominance
• iPad overtakes iPhone in September

The bigger picture

• Apple also grows desktop share from 7.8% in June to 9% in September
• Unix and Linux consistently show less than 0.5% of the traffic share
• Mobile device usage peaked over August, doubling from 1.6% in July to 3.2% in August (down to 2% in September)

Given the relative popularity amongst my friends of Android and the absence of an abundance of iPads in their lives this data is highly surprising.  I'd love to know if this tallies with the wider picture, or whether the Apple Effect is accentuated given the nature of the websites I run.


@JamesFirth