iPhone browsing marketshare closes in on .1%

Net Applications came out with its quarterly browser marketshare report this weekend. More surprising than the solid market share gains that the Mac platform made, was iPhone's phenomenal showing.

Edit: A second survey by Canalys is also showing huge market share for iPhone.

.09 percent may seem like an extremely small marketshare but when you consider that the iPhone has only been selling for 5 months and for most of that time was in one – albeit large – market (the U.S.), that share is amazing. Add another .01% for the iPod touch and Apple mobile platform is one out of every thousand pageviews across the Internet.

The WindowsCE platform - all of the Windows mobile platform devices put together - only managed 66% of iPhones market share. How many WinCE devices are out there? According to Gartner, MS and its partners shipped over three million Windows Mobile devices in Q1 2007. They've been selling WindowsCE devices since 1996 - over 10 years.

In under two quarters, Apple's handheld platform has passed Microsoft's over a decade-old mobile platform in terms of browser use.

Obviously this doesn't translate to handset marketshare. We know there are much more than 20 million Windows Mobile devices out there. The reason that Apple's browser marketshare is higher while its unit sales are much lower is explained easily by the oft-touted Mobile Safari browser and unlimited AT&T data plan. No guilt, pleasurable, full-browser surfing.

It's not just just Windows Mobile that is getting killed by iPhone. PSP, Playstation and WebTV combined don't even come close. The Sidekick, also, only has 1/5 of the browser marketshare. Symbian? About 1/10th.

And it doesn't stop there. Desktop platforms are starting to come into the iPhone's blast radius. Windows 95 has less than a quarter of the marketshare of the iPhone. And all of the Linux variants combined, just over five times (.57%) the market. Broken out over Red Hat, Novel, Ubuntu, etc, someone is losing to the iPhone right now. At this rate, the iPhone/iPod platform should be the third largest computing platform by the end of next year. Remember, the iPod touch is only three months old. Oh, and it is Christmas.

Not a bad first five months for Apple's new handheld OSX devices.

Full Net Applications stats below: