The 17 top phone models account for 75% of the market
by Irina Sandu
When we launched Firefox for mobile on Android we were facing new challenges with regards to device compatibility. This was new for Mozilla, because on the desktop you do not need to test the whole range of hardware which ships with the platform you run on. Also our previous mobile efforts, for Maemo, included only 2 device models. But on Android, we had dozens of different phones. And testing all of them would not be an easy task.
So I wanted to see exactly what would be a decent amount of phones that we need to test in order to make sure that we cover a good amount of all Androids that are in people’s hands.
I looked at data of Android devices in market for the US, Western Europe (UK, France, Germany, Spain, Italy) and Japan and come to the conclusions that:
there is an average of 57 Android models per country
17 (35%) of them cover 75% of all of the phones in the market
It turns out that at one given time there are a few top devices which everybody has and then a long tail of others. The other are made up of not so successful models that will never rise to be popular ones and some which were recenly launched and haven’t had time to get owners. You can usually identify the ones in the long tail which are likely to become top devices by looking at how widely they are marketed, or success in other markets.
Here in Israel it is becoming very popular to buy phones from cellular phones importers rather than cellular providers. This means that while only few phones are actually ‘officially supported’ by the cellular providers, we are flooded by almost any model of smartphone ever manufactured, including an old models which are marketed as low price smartphones instead of a very limited phone which isn’t capable of running high-end applications such as Firefox. Here in Israel almost no one actually using Firefox on their mobile. I won’t be very surprised if I’ll hear that there is more users for Firefox Home than Firefox Mobile users. Users are complaining that they can’t run Firefox on their phones due to incompatibilities and other issues, while the users who actually managed to install it complain about slowness and other usage difficult.
“17 (35%) of them cover 75% of all of the phones in the market”Is this Android market or overall smartphones market including other operating systems like iOS, Symbian, WM etc?
@Tomer CohenWe are tracking how the Android market looks like in terms of phone performance and are also working on a project to see exactly on what % of all Android devices Firefox is running well on. But from what I see, the proportion of phones that do not fulfill our system requirements is going down, so we know that Firefox is in a good place now and will be in a better one in the future.
@ janrosaIt’s part of the Android market.