Why Android users surf less than iPhone users | Hacker News Reader

Why Android users surf less than iPhone users

quirksmode.org

21 pointshisyam52 comments

iOS user here, so bias acknowledged, but I am a mobile security guy and I get new phones quite often.

Just last week I fired up the new Google Nexus device from LG and tried to spend a full week on it--for the purpose of being more familiar with Android as a user.

I couldn't make it a full 24 hours.

This was a fully stock Android experience, on the latest and greatest phone, and Chrome crashed six (6) times on me. Scrolling in the browser was markedly inferior. And the overall experience of reading on the device just felt far worse.

I didn't want to read anything on it, honestly. I tried to account for my own bias towards iPhone/iOS, but I don't think it makes up even half of the bad experience I had.

In short, I think Android phones discourage, from a UX standpoint, the activity of browsing. And I think that's a much larger factor than that mentioned in the original post.

I'm an Android user, and I agree completely with this. Browsing the web on Android is a painful experience.

I've personally had a different experience. (Background: I've had an iPhone 3GS and 4, HTC EVO 4G, a LG Optimus from Sprint and Virgin Mobile, some dirt cheap Android-based Samsung smartphone, and now the Samsung Galaxy Note II. All of these devices I've used for a minimum of multiple days

Other than the stock browser on the Samsung Galaxy Note II (which is easily replaced by Google Chrome's mobile browser) I haven't had issues with any Android device browsing the web compared to an iPhone. In fact in my experience, I would without a doubt say Chrome has been a better experience than Safari. Google Chrome's integration with their desktop browser has been awesome since I use Google Chrome on all my desktops.

But this is personal experience, and you can't really base all of this off personal experience. Second, if you're used to the iOS interface, switching to Android will be a big adjustment, one that if you only give it 24 hours you won't ever enjoy.

What does that even mean? Are you talking about the browser itself? About using a low-end Android phone?

Now I'm curious (I haven't used a newer Android phone). Is this common to Android phones or just the newest Nexus?

I have a Nexus 4, and this is completely over-blown. Mind you, my experience with the iphone is infrequent (wife has one), but I find the browsing experience on the Nexus 4 to be fine.

I got a chance to play with a friends Nexus 4 and it's a pretty smooth experience. Thanks for the input.

Android 2.x is a far cry from Android 4.x (particularly 4.1+) - as of 4.1, the UX is phenominal, IMO.

The scrolling difference is due to differences in how Android and iOS prioritize things. On iOS, putting your finger on the screen stops all processing on the page - no rendering, no animation, no Javascript, no downloading, nothing runs until you lift your finger off the screen. This lets the system devote 100% of its processing power to moving that rendered graphic around.

Android, by comparison, continues to perform its tasks while you scroll. This means that the scrolling can be jerkier if things are loading, but you continue to get a full interactive page while you're scrolling.

Speaking as a developer, iOS(/mobile Safari) gives me fits. It's the mobile generation's IE6.

Well, given that a tiny fraction of users are developers, doesn't it seem like a poor decision on Google's part to have a poor user experience in order to help in some other area?

Seems like UX should in fact be the highest priority.

The way that iOS does things prevents developers from doing things to help UX! For example, as an effect of this prioritization, iOS doesn't report scroll position while you're scrolling a page or scrollable div in a page, until the scroll has completed, and the scroll momentum has come to a full stop. This makes all sorts of app-like interactions impossible in an iOS webapp.

I don't really think that the user experience is poor, per se. I think it's a matter of acclimation; I've been using Android since the Nexus One, and while it was certainly frustrating in the past, Android 4.1 really stepped things up, and it's a really nice experience now. I appreciate how iOS scrolling feels, but in general, Android's way of doing things seems to be a lot nicer to me. I actively use Android and iOS devices on a daily basis (my phone is an LG Nexus 4, the same one you disliked), and Android feels much, much better to me than iOS does, with the sole exception of scrolling smoothness.

It's worth noting that there is one difference that might have been annoying you; iOS starts scrolling as soon as you start moving your finger. Android has a deadzone of a few pixels, so it might feel less responsive if you're used to the lack of deadzone on iOS. Once you're used to it, it's not an issue.

I don't think this is strictly true. The runloop has different modes, and you can attach background operations to them accordingly. It's true that scrolling does block some modes (and by extension some background tasks and timers), though.

Perhaps in apps, but not in the browser.

"...no downloading, nothing runs until you lift your finger off the screen."

It's not true. The browser continues fetching data, and the kernel continues with context switching.

I'll have to try it again then. Last I'd looked at it (this was early iOS 5), though, it caused really nasty issues with a preloading gallery I was working on. We ended up having to preload several slides in advance, as iOS would just flatly refuse to do anything in the page until the user had removed their finger from the page. The context switching I'll give you. I really meant that the browser appears to stop doing all its stuff while you're touching the screen, not that the system comes to a full halt. Obviously the render loop is still running.

The fact that you also don't get scroll position updates until the drag momentum wears out is also a giant pain in the ass.

Maybe that's why iOS has so much more "mobile data" - all these weird hacks like prefetching a bunch of data the user may never see in order to make scrolling behavior more acceptable.

This has been repeatedly invalidated over and over and over again, and I'm really tired of being brought up as the excuse.

First, you can simply prove that's not right empirically: start loading a large page, slap down your finger, scroll around for awhile, notice that the rendering has halted (which seems to confirm what you're saying), and then release your finger, to witness the page snap to 100% completeness. Why? Because things were indeed continuing in the background; the only thing that "blocked" is that the OpenGL canvas you're dragging around doesn't get swapped while you're scrolling.

Here's what's actually happening: iOS makes it absurdly easy to do computations on background threads. Android doesn't. iOS makes it very easy to offload a lot of processing to the GPU. Android doesn't. The difficulty means that many apps end up doing computation and actual rendering on the UI thread, which, surprise, makes for a jerky experience, whereas most iOS apps do the computation on a different thread than they do their rendering. Throw in that Dalvik's GC is beyond horrible and you've got everything you need for a nice and jittery UI experience.

Note that Android absolutely allows you to do background processing, GPU-heavy rendering; it's just harder. You can even avod the GC by carefully reusing objects in fast-render loops. In fact, our Android Trello dev either just released or is about to release an update to the Android app that makes it scroll smooth as silk by doing all of the above. But it requires a lot more effort to get to the same place, which is why "all" iOS apps perform better than Android ones.

I must be doing something different, because performing your exact test doesn't have the results you describe.

I just opened a CNET article on my latest-gen iPod Touch running iOS 6. When the page was half-loaded (header loaded in, no content yet), I placed my finger on the page and dragged it a couple pixels. I left it there for 30 seconds - nothing on the page changed during this time - then removed my finger. I then very clearly watched the story header image progressively download, and it took several more seconds for the page to become fully rendered.

There's an easy way to test this: visit a very large site while tcpdump or Burp is capturing all your HTTP traffic. And upon first touch of the site, put your finger on the screen.

Does the stream of requests from your phone stop? No, it doesn't. The requests visibly continue to be made in the background as the page continues to load, so your comment isn't accurate.

Okay, here you go. Installed tcpdump on my router, grabbed all traffic to my ipod during the test. The test consisted of opening one webpage (cnet, again), and putting my finger down on the screen twice while the page was loading. I opened the dump in Wireshark and filtered it to HTTP traffic.

http://cl.ly/image/1R0v1P3y0J1u

You can clearly see that traffic stops at 8 seconds, when I put my finger on the device. It then resumes 23 seconds later, when I remove my finger. It then stops again 2 seconds later, when I put my finger back on the device. This was one pageload, no shennanigans, just putting my finger down on the device and scrolling it slightly while the page was loading. It took ~40 seconds to load that page because I had my finger on the screen.

It looks an awful lot like the device is not downloading anything while my finger is on the screen. It certainly didn't just snap to "fully rendered" when I removed my finger at 31 seconds.

I think this is an iPod limitation implemented by Apple. I have the iPhone 5, loaded a large non-mobile site, and did the same thing. Upon lifting my finger, the rest of the page loads instantly.

The same behavior that I observed happens on my first-gen iPad, FWIW. I don't have an iPhone to test with.

Reading - really? What exactly was the problem with reading?

I've read several very long ebooks on my Android phone without problems, and that was when I still had a Nexus One. For example I read Reamde which I think has almost 1000 pages.

You didn't read Reamde in the browser, though, did you?

No, but I assumed his problems where with screen resolution or something. Last time I looked, the Android browsers could render text. I actually use Firefox on Android most of the time. There are choices.

I've had my Nexus 4 for a week or so and I've had the opposite experience. No crashes, excellent performance. I like it so much I use it over my laptop much of the time.

This is ridiculous, if I'm reading it right.

For one thing, the carrier I currently use (AT&T), forces you to buy a data plan if you have a smartphone. I'd be surprised if this wasn't the case for all carriers. So that blows the conclusion out of the water.

But why ask the question in the first place? Because the Android browser market share is so much lower than the Android market share as a whole? I would presume that "browser share" comes from the web, which can be accessed by all sorts of devices, and "mobile market share" comes just from mobile devices. That alone probably makes the question moot. But even if it didn't, there's Opera, Firefox, Chrome and all sorts of other browsers on Android that could make up the gap.

In other words, I doubt the premise (Android users surf the web less) as well as the conclusion (this is due to most Android users being too price averse to use data). I just don't see any evidence of either.

I have a data plan on an iPhone with AT&T and I pay an additional $15 over the standard 450 minute plan for 200 MB of data. I understand that AT&T has raised this minimum to $20 for 300 MB.

That price won't break the bank for most people but 200-300 MB for a month of data isn't much. I'm generally on WiFi so I don't care but I suspect that many people would find this too small for comfort. If they don't care about surfing from the phone, I can see people just avoiding using any data at all so that they don't have to worry about additional fees.

That is exactly the reason I rarely use my phone for browsing. The internet is just too expensive.

I'm with AT&T and went to the $15/month a couple years ago (don't know if the price went up, I'm on someone else's contract and I've never actually seen the bill). It's a pain to worry about bandwidth, and video is out of the question. Yes, WiFi bandwidth is free, but sometimes I forget to turn on WiFi, then almost have a heart attack when I see how much bandwidth I've consumed (thanks to the "3G Watchdog" app). It's just significantly less stressful to put the android phone down on my desk and just surf on my desktop or laptop on my Cable connection.

1. These stats are worldwide. I believe the US phone market isn't very representative and most phone contracts sold last year did not come with lots of inclusive data.

2. These stats are just for mobile devices.

The average Android user may surf less than the average iPhone user, but there are also way more of them. There are loads of cheap low-end Android devices that are able to browse the internet, but the people who buy them are not so interested in that. Apple doesn't make low-end phones (although they do sell old models), so it is a much more conscious decision to spend that much money on a phone. I think that if you take out all the people who went to a store "just to buy a phone" and just include people who buy high end models like the Samsung Galaxy, Google Nexus etc. the browser usage picture is not that different from iPhone users.

There are loads of cheap low-end Android devices that are able to browse the internet, but the people who buy them are not so interested in that

Case in point: my wife and I both have Android phones, so when my mother in law needed a phone, we got her an Android too. She has not used the internet once on it, but we installed a few apps to make it easier for her to use (e.g. one app puts a picture of the last person who called on the home screen). We also set it up to dial out through Google Voice (total integration is best on Android, including replacing the dialer). I bet a large portion of Android users fall into this category.

As an Android user, I would guess that the most significant reason why Android users browse less may have more to do with conserving the battery than anything else. My experience with Android and the battery life has been miserable. My Nexus 4 seems better, though.

Wait, what? The whole premise is completely and utterly false?

http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-ww-monthly-201112-20121...

Android: 33% iOS: 23%

That is a major difference in favor of Android. Why write a blog post without even checking the data?!

iOS still has a clear lead in North America.

And Android has a clear lead in China, the biggest market. These stats also largely mirror the distribution of Android phone purchases. What's your point?

http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-ww-monthly-201212-20130...

Worldwide, Android still leads by 10% in web browsing.

As multiple people have pointed out, the reason Android "leads" by 10% in web browsing (especially in China) is because there are a ridiculous number of cheap Android phones out there, leading to a larger amount of total traffic from Android.

To really understand what the OP is talking about, you need to think in terms of per capita browsing in iOS and Android. In other words, how much web browsing does your average iOS user do, vs your average Android user? That is really what matters.

Based on whose stats?

Yes, but those are absolute usage numbers. There is 1.43 times as much traffic coming from Android devices as there is from iOS. However, there are far more Android devices shipped than iOS devices, so they browse relatively less: http://www.asymco.com/2012/11/05/the-late-smartphone-adopter...

On top of that, the Statcounter numbers also include tablets, so smart phone only numbers would look very different. Android tablet usage is a fraction of iPad usage (source: stats of a European site with 100M+ monthly visitors). For smartphones, it's more like Android 35% iOS 57%.

Your numbers do not make sense.

If Android's 33% and iOS's 23% include tablets and we remove tablets, then Android's numbers will not decrease much. As you have said, there are fewer Android tablets than iOS tablets. So removing tablets would increase the relative market share of Android and not reduce it.

So if you remove tablets, you would not expect "Android 35% iOS 57%", but would instead expect something like Android 43% iOS 13% (numbers made up).

EDIT: Also following the trend, it is clear that more and more people are using Android for web browsing every week. This implies that the 40%+ more Android web usage will quickly increase.

EDIT2: The issue of tablets is irrelevant to statcounter's stats, as the iPad and other android tablets are not included. Leaving the comment above as it is still technically correct if the post above were to be correct...

http://blog.chron.com/techblog/2012/07/whos-ahead-in-mobile-... (comment by StatCounterGS half way down the page)

You are right, I said the reverse of what I meant to say w.r.t. tablet numbers there. Those numbers were real though (measured in the UK over the past month, phones only).

My main point though, was that there are far more Android phones than there are iPhones, so even though there is more Android browser traffic, the average Android user will browse less (but that's mostly because there are so many low-end Android devices that water down the browsing habits of high-end users on shiny Galaxies and Nexuses).

You failed to mention that the iOS Safari market share is the same as Android's, which makes sense considering they have about equal installed bases right now (although the Android one is growing much quicker).

I'm not sure i agree with his reasons, mostly because what the data really shows is that Android users don't really browse on Wi-Fi [1] (on 3G the discrepancy - device marketshare vs browsing marketshare - is much lower).

My opinion (with anecdotal evidence) is that Android users just stick with their PCs when at home (presumably when they have Wi-Fi), whereas iOS users prefer the small screen, for some reason.

[1] http://blog.cloudfour.com/explaining-the-ios-and-android-mob...

Seriously, they distinguish between mobile browser usage on Wi-Fi vs 3G? That doesn't make much sense, at least not if you wonder what device you should optimize for. Perhaps you could conclude that Wi-Fi surfers would tolerate bigger web sites, though.

Android user here. I don't do a lot of surfing on my phone because I would rather use a larger screen. Using my wife's iPad or my Asus tablet is a little better but I still prefer to use my laptop when it is handy. So if I am out and about and really need to access the web, I do it. But when my laptop is just in the office... I use the laptop.

I don't think the data is complete unless you also include whether or not these same people even have a computer anymore. Whether it is right or wrong, we keep being told that the desktop is dead... so maybe iOS users have bought into that idea more than Android users. If all you own is an iOS device.. you don't really have much choice of how you surf the web.

Android is the default OS, so naturally it picks up a lot of users that don't want to use all of it's core features. No surprises here.

Here's the report he's talking about:

http://www.quirksmode.org/blog/archives/2012/12/browser_stat...

What does he find so strange about this? The chart counts all phone browser market shares. And Android's user base is not 5x that of iOS, if that's what he's implying.

His article makes no sense, because the data he's talking about doesn't match at all his "conclusions". The 48% number is for smartphones only, meaning mostly just Android and iOS, as the others are very tiny market share. But it's not the whole phone market, as the first chart above shows. So he's mixing both, and concludes that "Android has half of the market, but only 24% browser share". Ugh, this post is a mess.

Android has half the SMARTPHONE market, but has much less from the PHONE market. That's why it only has 24%, just like iOS in the PHONE market.

Why use old data? Use current data and argue a position from there.

http://gs.statcounter.com/#mobile_os-ww-monthly-201112-20121...

The Q3 data point is just before iOS and Android began to diverge dramatically.

I would argue that Android users generally have more important/interesting things to do than surfing on their phone all day.

Are you serious? Please, don't be serious.

You're right, the majority of Android users are international business men, unlike those pesky iPhone users, who are all 12 year old girls playing Angry Birds 24/7.

In case you're not trolling, why is it that the business class cabin of most flights is full of iPhone users? Why is it that most artists, journalists, photographers, etc. seem to lean heavily towards iOS?

I'm not saying you're wrong, I'm just asking what group you think it is that is highly busy/productive, on Android, and doesn't show up in web logs?

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