We continue our survey of the mobile browser market shares of twelve countries: Brazil, China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Mexico, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Poland, South Korea, the UK, and the US. In all countries I studied the Q4 2010 aggregate stats and compared them to the Q3 ones.

In part 1 we studied three developing nations that each had Opera as their leading browser; in part 2 we discussed the US and the UK, which feature a three-way race between Safari, BlackBerry, and Android, and South Korea, where Android (more specifically, homegrown Samsung Galaxy) is dominant.

This entry treats Brazil, Mexico, and China. Figures, as usual, come from StatCounter.

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It’s said that Twitter and Facebook play an important role in the current Egyptian revolution, and that closing down the Internet was the best step the beleagured government could take. I don’t believe it.

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W3C unveils the Touch Events Specification. It’s a rough draft, I guess — it doesn’t even have an official URL on www.w3.org yet. But I like it a lot.

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This week was a bit slow.

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App stores, pioneered by Apple, aim to provide ease of payments and discoverability to developers and consumers. However,

1. do they offer unique advantages that no other payment or discoverability system can match?
2. is Apple’s success transferable to other app stores?

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We continue our survey of the mobile browser market shares of twelve countries: Brazil, China, Egypt, India, Indonesia, Mexico, the Netherlands, Nigeria, Poland, South Korea, the UK, and the US. In all countries I studied the Q4 2010 aggregate stats and compared them to the Q3 ones. At the end of this article are some methodological notes.

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This week’s.

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Belgium is investigating whether Apple’s recent changes to its subscription policies for newspaper apps are an abuse of its dominant market position. Apple no longer allows newspapers to provide free digital versions to their print subscribers. This could possibly lead to a new antitrust affair.

This story seems to play only in Belgium and the Netherlands for now; readers from other countries may not know it. That’s why I wrote this special report.

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Yesterday Horace Dediu tweeted:

A browser is an infinitely flexible interface, but is it the best interface for everything? Apps allow experiments in new interaction models

The browser is not the most advanced interface there is. It’s too easy to build the wrong features into something as flexible as a browser, and once a badly-designed feature gains traction it’s impossible to get rid of it. (See HTML5 drag and drop.)

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When I had studied the global browser stats I decided to delve a bit deeper into individual countries, because their stats differ a lot, and looking only at the global picture can distort your viewpoint.

I picked twelve countries around the world that can be (more-or-less) seen as kind-of a representative(ish) stand-in for a certain type of countries. Be warned, however, that every country is unique and that you should study yours straight away.

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This week’s.

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One of the major changes 2011 is going to bring is the start of operator billing on the web. It will provide a user-friendly way of making mobile (and web) payments without those silly credit cards that are preventing the majority of the world to participate.

Operator billing is nothing new. Premium SMS (see for instance Verizon’s FAQ) , where the user pays something extra to receive news items or ringtones, or vote in a TV show, has existed for ages. The price is automatically charged to your operator account.

The most advanced country on earth when it comes to mobile payments is Kenya. About 50% of the population handles about 20% of GDP by mobile phones these days. The social consequences are profound, and operator Safaricom became the biggest bank in East Africa in the process.

Update: I finally found a good description of the system.

Banks and credit card companies of the world, be very afraid. The operators will come to take your business away.

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Here are the mobile browser traffic market share figures from StatCounter. This entry gives the stats for December 2010, Q4 2010, and all of 2010, and compares them to November, Q3, and 2009. I plan to repeat this feature each month, and to report quarterly and yearly figures when appropriate. (Not that you need me; you can easily crunch the data for yourself.)

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At the end of December I turned off comments for the QuirksBlog. As far as I’m concerned they’ll stay turned off forever, except when I actually want to ask a question.

I didn’t take this decision, the decision took itself while I looked on musingly. The time has come, and I give up a little bit of good stuff in order to get rid of a serious annoyance as well as comment spam.

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This week’s.

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App stores, so it is assumed, will allow developers to forge a direct link to consumers, which causes consumers to directly pay developers for their hard work. Thus they’re secretly seen as a shortcut for the hard work of a start-up, that (ideally) also forges such links.

This monetisation argument is the fetish of the current age. Unfortunately it is utter and complete rubbish. The fundamental problem, as I calculated months ago, is that there’s just not enough money in the app store economy to support a meaningful number of independent developers.

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