During his keynote at the release of the iPhone 5, Apple CEO Tim Cook had a little fun at the expense of the company’s competitors. While admitting that the iPad’s market share in the tablet space had slipped to about 65%, Cook made the point that iPads make up 91% of all tablet web traffic, saying “”I don’t know what these other tables are doing. They must be in warehouses or on store shelves, or maybe in someone’s drawer.”
Onswipe, a New York startup which helps publishers optimize their sites for touch enabled devices, has just released some new data, and it turns out Apple’s lead could be even bigger than Cook boasted. The measurements are taken from 8.5 million unique visitors across the more than one hundred publishers that use Onswipe to power their mobile sites. The stats, updated as of this week, show that 98 percent of tablet traffic on the web comes from iPads, a larger lead than Onswipe was seeing just six months ago.
While praising the web surfing experience on Google’s Nexus tablet, and also noting that Amazon’s Kindle Fire had “moved a lot of units,” Jason Baptiste, Onswipe’s founder and CEO said one thing was clear, “when it comes to browsing the web from a tablet, Apple is still the only game in town.”
One exception in the overwhelming dominance of the iPad for web browsing comes in the category of “Time per Visit.” Kindle Fire owners are spending 79% more time per visit than iPad users, and generate 138% more pageviews per visit. “I think its a reflection of how people use a Kindle. They read books, they watch movies, they are carving out a few hours to lean back with the device,” says Baptiste.
