iPad Holiday Web Browsing Share Drops Significantly Due To Android Competitors

It appears that quite a few folks received non-iPad tablets for holiday gifts this year. According to statistics from Chitika Insights, which tracks Web usage by device, traffic on iPads dipped sharply this December, losing ground to almost all of its main competition.

To say that the iPad is still the most-used tablet for Web browsing is an understatement--the device is currently used for 78.86% of traffic--but before the holidays, it had 86% of Web traffic, which is a decline of 7.14%.

Chitika Web usage

Meanwhile, people started using other tablets much more; the Kindle Fire (3.03%), Samsung Galaxy tablets (1.38%), Google Nexus tablets (0.92%), and Microsoft Surface (0.17%) all saw increased Web usage over the holiday season.

Chitika chalks up a certain percentage of that change to people using their shiny new toys while on holiday vacation and expects the numbers to plane out a bit in the new year, but the firm believes the iPad will only rebound to about 80% of Web traffic.

These numbers aren’t at all surprising; while the iPad remains a superb device, those things are pricey, and there’s a glut of very fine and often much less expensive Android and Windows tablets flooding the market that will undoubtedly continue to bite into Apple’s dominant market share.