iPhone Surges Web Traffic
When I traded up my Treo 650 for my iPhone one of the biggest differences I noticed (and that’s saying something because there were a lot of big differences, savvy?) was the web browser. The browsing experience, completely apart from download speeds, was like night and day - where I would subconciously dread doing anything on my Treo, even while at the same time saying how well I thought Blazer’s optimize mode worked, I found myself browsing on the iPhone constantly - even to the point where I’d do things on the iPhone I might normally have hauled my lazy ass to the computer not two steps away from me to browse.
So it is with no surprise that I read this piece on the NYTimes today saying the Google saw a surge in iPhone traffic on christmas wherein Apple’s baby surpassed all incoming traffic from any other type of mobile device. It settled down the next day handing the title back to Symbian - but market share tells the tale, Symbian owns 63% of the smartphone market and Apple’s got a meagre 2%.
The difference is that with the iPhone you simply surf more, there’s very little reason not to, it works well and fast and supports most AJAX’y things, although sadly not flash. This is already having a halo effect for Safari - it moved from a B+/A- list browser - usually supported, but sometimes not to become a must support browser along with Firefox and IE. Not because iPhone traffic amounts to anything when compared to desktop traffic, but because mobile traffic is beginning to burgeon and the iPhone has clearly shown the way. Shown the way so well that Nokia and Google are both using WebKit as the basis of their web browsers. (WebKit is the basis of Safari and Mobile Safari)
It used to be hard, really hard, to optimize your site for a mobile device. They tended to do odd things to your layout or not support a variety of features so you had to do crazy things to get it working. Not so with the iPhone - now you more or less just have to support Safari and it shows up great. Throw in a viewport tag to specify the zoom width, maybe a couple other minor styles and you’re done.
Sure Safari sometimes does some crazy stuff interpreting html/css and it’s hard enough to get the puzzle working cross-platform with IE and Firefox - but throw in just a little of that WebKit sauce and boom, you’ve got yourself a mobile site. And with Nokia, the number 1 by market share, moving to WebKit and the next hot OS (although I still remain kinda skeptical), Android, using it as its basis that’s pretty much all she wrote. Not too shabby. Apple was brilliant for a) making browsing so useable on the iPhone and b) for using mobile Safari to wedge itself firmly into the browser wars.
