Motorola Droid shows fast boost in US mobile browser traffic

After one week, Droid accounts for about 1/4 of all Android browsing

By John Cox on Wed, 11/11/09 - 3:22pm.

After just a week on sale, and something like 100,000+ units sold, the Motorola Droid smartphone on Verizon now accounts for almost 25% of U.S. mobile browser traffic for Android-based devices.

That's the estimate by Web analytics site, Clicky, based on their analysis of mobile traffic on 150,000 Websites.

Those numbers, not surprisingly, are a tiny fraction of the iPhone's. According to Clicky (and the numbers are updated every 30 minutes), iPhone has about 53% of US marketshare for Web browsing. All Android devices come to just under 7%. But the Droid now accounts for about 1.6% per cent of that, pretty close to one-quarter of the traffic. The rest of the mobile browsers share just under 40% of the US traffic.

The Droid seems to be exibiting a pattern similar to the iPhone: a relatively few AT&T iPhone subscribers drove a huge increase in Web data traffic thanks to the iPhone's big screen, multi-touch UI, and the mobile version Apple's Safari browser. The increase has been so pronounced that some think it's the real cause for the the litany of complaints about AT&T's network performance.