Fresh survey of Android users reveals their fave browser, version of the OS used most, and more

Third-party Android app store Uptodown went through the traffic stats created by its 132 million unique monthly users and more than 4.5 million published files and was able to reach some conclusions. One, Google Chrome is the most popular Android browser. This would seem to be a no-brainer especially because it is pre-installed on most Android phones. Employed by 85.5% of Android users (up two percentage points from last year), Chrome is the mobile browser that Android users turn to first.

Far behind Chrome is the second most popular mobile browser on Android, the Samsung Internet Browser which is used by 3.7% of Android users. Opera is next at 1.74%. Samsung Internet Browser is an extremely good browser which I had as my default Android browser until I replaced it with Opera. The latter was third in the survey, used by 1.74% of Android device owners followed by UC Browser and Mozilla Firefox with market shares of .70% and .65% respectively. Tap on the link to install each browser from the Play Store.

For the second consecutive year, Android 11 is the most widely used version of Android with the software found on 20.89% of Android devices. What makes this shocking is that there have been two releases since then (Android 12 and Android 13) and still three-year-old software is at the top of the list. Android 13 is next, found on 17.23% of Android phones, followed by Android 12 (12.95%), Android 10 (12.34%), and Android 9 (8.14%).

Despite what appears to be a long-standong fragmentation issue with Android due to its many manufacturers, Uptodown notes that Android 13 "has managed to quickly gain a considerable user base in a short period since its launch, attributed to the expectation of improvements in performance, security, and new features that drive users who can afford it to upgrade their handsets to its latest available version." Android 13 was released last August.

The most popular brand of smartphone owned by Android users is Samsung. This is no surprise since the company leads all manufacturers in global smartphone shipments annually. While many would say that Huawei would be at the top now if not for U.S. restrictions placed on the firm, it is what it is and Samsung owns 31.51% of the market for Android devices. With an 18.73% slice of the Android pie (no, not Android Pie which was version 9), Xiaomi is next. Huawei is third with a 10.04% share with Oppo (5.92%) and Vivo (5.41%) rounding out the top five.

The traffic that the data was collected from covers January 1st through June 23 of this year except for the stats about which version of Android is in use the most. For that question, the data employed was generated between June 19th and June 23rd to make up for what Uptodown calls "the constant evolution in the operating system's update rate."