Mobile Browser Usage

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AppleInsider reporting that iOS is responsible:

The 65.27 percent share of Apple's iOS platform, which is found on the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch, was up from 62.65 percent in May. Apple's share has steadily risen, growing from a 53 percent position in August of 2011.

Apple's next closest competitor in mobile browsing market is Google's Android platform, which took 19.73 percent in the month of June. Android has also seen its share grow since last August, when it took 15.98 percent of mobile browsers.

Okay, so what? Filter that stat through the lens of this stat and it becomes much more impressive (Joel Mathis, reporting for Macworld):

ComScore’s report, released this week, was based on a survey of 30,000 smartphone subscribers. The company reported that Apple’s iOS platform ranked second to Google’s Android platform—31.9 percent to 50.0 percent, though Apple’s 1.7 percent growth in share from February to May doubled Google’s gain during that time.

Chrome for Android

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Google:

In 2008, we launched Google Chrome to help make the web better. We’re excited that millions of people around the world use Chrome as their primary browser and we want to keep improving that experience. Today, we’re introducing Chrome for Android Beta, which brings many of the things you’ve come to love about Chrome to your Android 4.0 Ice Cream Sandwich phone or tablet.

This looks like a really terrific browser, and has been touted by some as having some features that even make it better than mobile Safari. That all may be true, but my questions is this:

Why has it taken over 4 years to make this happen?

Seriously. Chrome was released in 2008, the same time as modern Android, presumably the two were being developed at the same time. Surely they could have included Chrome in the first version of Android if they wanted to at all. This is the sort of thing that would never happen at Apple. One of the three marquee feature touted by Jobs at the iPhone's unveiling at Macworld 2007 was the "Breakthrough Internet Communicator". It's well-known that the default jukebox software is sub-par. So when Android shipped it only had one of the three marquee features present in Apple's iPhone. Jobs said iPhone was 5 years ahead of anything else — history is again proving him right.

(via The Next Web)