There has been much said about the imminent demise of RIM’s Blackberry in the face of the unstoppable momentum of Android (and previously the iPhone). But here’s an interesting piece of information: According to data from Statcounter, Blackberry is growing just as fast as Android, at least in terms of global Web usage. Blackberry users have doubled their Web presence in the last 12 months.
So while some recent reports say that Blackberry is falling behind in the mobile race, perhaps that is not the case after all.
Note: The stats from Statcounter are based on global visitor stats from more than 3 million websites. In the graph above we’ve made a small adjustment to the Android numbers for May and June due to a now corrected OS detection error in Statcounter’s software.
If these numbers are any indication, maybe we shouldn’t count RIM out quite yet. True, if you look solely at the US market, Android is gaining on Blackberry, at least in terms of Web usage, and has a larger portion of the pie overall, but that’s just in the United States.
More to come?
With the newest Blackberry OS (version 6) having an improved browser (Webkit based, just like the one in Android and iPhone), it’s possible that we’ll see Blackberry Web usage increase even more over the coming months. It’s interesting, though, that usage has been growing even before the arrival of the new OS and browser. Perhaps the news of Blackberry’s demise have been greatly exaggerated?
Here in Sweden, Blackberry is more or less a no-show, so we’d be interested in hearing what you think is behind this increase in Web usage. Is it that the behavior of RIM’s existing (very large) user base is changing, or simply that many of the reports so far have been misleading?
