I started out in tech fascinated by the idea of mobile phones as computing tools. I was particularly fascinated by the concept of mobile-friendly websites. That was in 2001, when the idea of browsing on mobile phones was still a novelty.
Back then, most phones had tiny screens, alpha-numeric keyboards, creepy-crawly dial-up internet, no WiFi, and first generation WAP browsers. WAP browsers were not web browsers. They could not load HTML content. They loaded WML content. I learned WML and began to hand-code mobile websites. My first tech blog was a collection of WAP pages that were hand-coded in WML. Since then, I have been a champion of mobile-friendly websites. Technology evolved to the point where mobile browsers could load HTML content and the world embraced responsive website design. Mobile was a tiny chunk of website traffic initially, but then it kept growing. Today, we live in a mobile-first world. Who knows? It might one day become mobile only. The world just might have to catch up with Mobility Arena, because with 99.25% of our traffic being mobile now, we are officially a mobile-only website. We could ditch the desktop interface completely and not lose anything significant. So, we dug around the stats to see what was going on. As an avid lover of mobile phones, I wanted to see what brands were being used to access Mobility Arena the most. It would be fun. And it turned out to be.
How the mobile platforms stand
We sat down to extract the top 10 mobile brands by traffic volume on Mobility Arena to see who was killing it. We got no shocks or surprises from the names that showed up at the top. But a shift is happening at the bottom end of the top 10 list. Some older brands are dropping off and a few new ones are climbing. These top 10 phone brands account for 85% of all mobile traffic on Mobility Arena. These figures are for the last three months – September, October, and November of 2020.
Apple has a strong showing, because iPhones make up a huge chunk of our international traffic from the USA, our largest foreign market. That is what is mostly responsible for the rather strong Apple showing. Of course, this is not to discount the fair number of people in this country buying and using ₦50,000 used iPhone 6 models through the black market.
A year ago, vivo was not on this list. OPPO wasn’t. Xiaomi would have struggled to have a showing too. But look at that bottom end now. Once upon a time, Nokia was in the top 5 on this list. It is struggling to stay on now. Samsung has stayed the course and is keeping a strong showing. Transsion’s three Musketeers are still going strong. Against all odds, Huawei has held on strongly, but Xiaomi is nibbling at its heels already. If Huawei’s travails with the US government continue, the brand will lose market share some more and drop further, unfortunately. OPPO and Vivo are two of the newest entrants in our smartphone market and they are carving sections of the market for themselves. Did you know that OPPO and Vivo belong to the same parent company, BBK Electronics? Yes; they are. Same way TECNO, Infinix, and itel belong under Transsion Holdings. So, it looks like BBK is quietly growing an army in the country. Anyway, I digress.
Mobility Arena as a mobile-only website
What next for us? Nothing. We are not turning off the desktop interface, particularly because our writers and administrators use it. I suspect that most of the 0.75% desktop traffic comes from our own in-house people. Much of our back-end work is done on large, non-mobile screens. And that is the future of the desktop – production. Most web content consumption is already happening on mobile and I expect that some day it will be mobile-only across board (if we are not counting smart TVs). It feels great to see it happen on my own website though, roughly 20 years after I first fell in love with the concept of mobile websites and began to pursue it.
Mobile-only websites are the future
If your website is not mobile-friendly in 2020, you are holding it back from growing. Most of today’s Web traffic is mobile and that isn’t going to change. It can only go all the way from here. PS: This needs to be said: the share of mobile traffic can drop to 80% or 70% tomorrow or the day after, so this new state is not a perfect state of existence. Website traffic depends on a number of factors. For now, we enjoy this moment. You are reading Mobility Arena, the essential guide for mobile phone users around the world. Be sure to check out our homepage for all the latest news and resources. To be notified of the most important articles and the best smartphone deals, join our WhatsApp Group and follow us on Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube. Don’t know where to start? Check out our reviews.
