Ariel Zambelich/WIRED
Smartphones with bigger screens are poaching Apple’s business from both ends of the size spectrum.
As noxious as the “phablet” category may be in name, phones with screens larger than the iPhone’s four inches are hitting the sweet spot where mobile users want to browse. Odds are, Apple will announce a new iPhone tomorrow with the biggest screen yet, but the reason is far from just cosmetic. In contrast to Apple’s past successes in defining expectations for how users should use devices, this time the company is playing catch-up.
Some of the most compelling data showing why Apple must expand the iPhone’s screen comes from software maker Adobe. Apple’s longtime frenemy has a marketing analytics arm that sifts through a huge volume of web traffic looking for industry trends. In a new report released Monday, based on the analysis over over 18 billion web visits, Adobe researchers say that browsing on screens larger than four inches has more than doubled. At the same time, web traffic flowing through devices the size of an iPhone or smaller is on an unmistakable decline, falling 11 percent compared to the same time last year.
‘The Samsung phones are starting to become more useful for browsing, and Apple ones are becoming less so.’
And the news for Apple gets worse. For a brief moment last year, tablet browsing topped smartphone browsing, according to Adobe’s metrics—a fillip for Apple, whose iPad accounts for 80 percent of tablet-driven web traffic. But since then, tablet browsing has flattened, while smartphone browsing has jumped, again due to phones with bigger screens.
“On both ends of the spectrum, this middle piece is taking away browsing from the iPhone and the tablet,” Adobe Digital Index principal analyst Tamara Gaffney tells WIRED.
Popular, But for How Long?
To be clear, Apple’s devices still command a definitive majority of mobile web traffic. In no way is Apple suffering for popularity.
But Apple’s absolute share of the market now is not the most salient number for gauging its future prospects. The decline in web traffic measured by Adobe parallels the stagnation in iPhone sales. While the figures are staggering in themselves, the growth curve has begun to level off, a trend that new features like Touch ID and iOS 7′s design revamp have failed to reverse. At the same time, iPad sales have declined in tandem with the rise in “phablet” popularity.
From Adobe’s figures, at least, Apple seems not to be offering users the bigger screen they increasingly want, and which archrival Samsung has been more than happy to offer. “The Samsung phones are starting to become more useful for browsing, and Apple ones are becoming less so,” Gaffney says.
Tomorrow, the world will see whether Apple really is listening to what users want, rather than once again trying to tell them. “The implication from the data is the tablet business for Apple has been impacted by that larger screen smartphone that I would say isn’t to their best interest,” Gaffney says.
Messaging Rules, Facebook Doesn’t
Adobe’s new report also looks at several other trends, involving everything from social networking to instant messaging. Although Apple is losing on screen size, for instance, it’s winning on messaging.
According to Adobe, sharing links over iMessage has more than tripled over the past year. Similar sharing on Facebook, meanwhile, has dropped 43 percent—a good indicator of why the world’s biggest social network was willing to pay $19 billion for WhatsApp. “People are less likely to want to share with these large networks they’ve created on Facebook,” Gaffney says. “Facebook has its place and its role in our lives, and it’s not going to go away. But I am suggesting it’s overly broad now.”
Facebook isn’t even the most mobile social network, at least by web traffic referrals. That would be Pinterest. Nearly two-thirds of click-throughs on Pinterest come from mobile users. Twitter follows close behind, with Facebook a distant third, by Adobe’s measure. As for clicks that turn into purchases, the most lucrative referrals come from Tumblr users on tablets, who spend an average of $2.57 per visit, compared to $1.55 for Facebook tablet users and $1.11 for Twitter.
The other interesting find is that people aren’t using tablets on cell networks—at least not that much. A full 93 percent of tablet web traffic was funneled over Wi-Fi, according to Adobe. Users just don’t want to pay for a separate data plan for their tablets, Gaffney says. What’s more, over half of all smartphone web browsing happened over WiFi as hot spots proliferate. “As WiFi becomes more available and a lot of mobile plans become more penalizing, people are learning how to switch over to WiFi on their phones,” Gaffney says. “The telcos through their data plans are essentially teaching people how to avoid mobile data charges.”
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