There have been quite a few reports in recent months that Android and Microsoft tablets are making significant gains in market share against the iPad. While this is certainly true in regards to the number of devices being shipped, it doesn’t appear to be translating into the amount of traffic being generated by tablets in general. According to a new report released from Chitika, the iPad is still far and away the most dominant tablet on the market for generating traffic.
Despite having dozens of tablets released from competitors over the past year, and sales on many of them being quite impressive, the traffic levels have hardly dropped at all. Specifically, In September of 2013, Apple generated 81% of all tablet web traffic. In September of 2014, that dropped to 79.9%, a difference of just 1.1%.
While it is a drop, one would have expected it to be far more significant due to the fact that so many more people are using other types of tablets.
Samsung improved in traffic generation by just under 1% and Microsoft had a nice jump of .6% (from 1% to 1.6%). Clearly, these moves are small compared to Apple, but they are at least making gains.
If you are optimizing a site for tablet traffic, however, you need to make sure that you are putting the main focus on the iPad since this is clearly going to be where the vast majority of people are coming from and that isn’t likely to change for several years at least.
