Local mobile browser markets: Mexico

It’s instructive to take a good look at some local mobile browser market stats, as always by StatCounter. Today we treat Mexico.

The Mexican market is the first one we study that adheres neither to the developing pattern we’ve seen in for instance India, or the western developed pattern we found in for instance the US. Opera Mini has a decent but declining market share, while Safari and especially Android are larger.

In fact, it’s Android WebKit that grows vigorously here, while Chrome grows, too. We haven’t seen that pattern before yet, and at the very least it means that cheap Androids (which likely run 2.x or early 4s) are popular in Maxico in addition to high-end Androids.

iPhone share is slowly slipping; most likely because more and more Mexicans use their non-Apple phones to go online, and not because iPhone sales are declining.

Opera (Mini) and Nokia are slipping, too, because Mexicans need less and less proxy browsers. Still, Nokia here can mean either Gecko-based proxy browser Xpress or Symbian WebKit; I’m not sure which one. Since Nokia’s market share in Mexico is old and well-established, it could be both. StatCounter’s figures do not allow us to make that distinction.

IE has the best market share we’ve seen so far: 6%. That’s mostly due to Nokia, which retains a decent market share here — witness Nokia’s own browser share.

The long tail is made up of BlackBerry (once a lot bigger), UC (again gaining a toehold), and two browsers we didn’t encounter before: Phantom, a WebKit-based LG browser that I studied for one day back in 2010, but whose current incarnation is unknown to me, and the Sony PlayStation Portable browser, which is NetFront-based, though I don’t know if that’s a WebKit-based NetFront or their old, proprietary, and fairly bad rendering engine.

Mobile browser stats for Mexico
Browser Q3 2013 ch Q2 2013 ch Q1 2013 ch Q4 2012
Android 42% +3 39% +1 38% +3 35%
Safari 20% -2 22% -1 23% -1 24%
Opera 15% -2 17% -2 19% -2 21%
Nokia 6% -1 7% -1 8% 0 8%
IE 6% 0 6% +2 4% +1 3%
Chrome 5% +3 2% +1 1% 0 1%
BlackBerry 2% 0 2% -1 3% 0 3%
UC 1% 0 1% 0 1% 0 1%
Phantom 1% 0 1% 0 1% 0 1%
Sony PSP 1% 0 1% 0 1% 0 1%
Other 1% -1 2% +1 1% -1 2%
Volatility 6% 5% 4%
Mobile 14% +1 12% +2 10% +3 7%

Other countries in this series:
Nigeria | India | Indonesia | South Korea | UK | US | Netherlands

This is the blog of Peter-Paul Koch, web developer, consultant, and trainer. You can also follow him on Twitter or Mastodon.
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