As of September 2020, Wikipedia's recorded web traffic from KaiOS devices has declined by about 80% over the past two years. Data from Statcounter and Device Atlas shows similar declines. The obvious question (which we may not succeed in answering) is why.
Description
Description
| Status | Subtype | Assigned | Task | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Resolved | nshahquinn-wmf | T262810 Understand decline in KaiOS web traffic | |||
| Resolved | nshahquinn-wmf | T242853 Investigate significant drop in KaiOS pageviews | |||
| Resolved | nshahquinn-wmf | T259819 Provide updated data on KaiOS readership | |||
| Resolved | nshahquinn-wmf | T233753 Gather stats about KaiOS readership from existing data | |||
| Resolved | nshahquinn-wmf | T261899 Investigate whether decline in Indian KaiOS traffic could be explained by user-agent misclassification | |||
| Resolved | nshahquinn-wmf | T262723 Investigate whether KaiOS web traffic decline is due to Google Web Light | |||
| Resolved | nshahquinn-wmf | T264656 Compile a summary of what we learned about the decline in KaiOS web traffic |
Event Timeline
Comment Actions
Ultimately, we concluded that the mid 2019 to mid 2020 decline occurred because of a general drop of KaiOS usage in India, its dominant market.
For example, our traffic decline closely matches Statcounter’s Indian marketshare data for KaiOS:
Similarly, DeviceAtlas's Indian mobile OS market share data shows KaiOS declining significantly over this period.
| July 2018 | September 2020 | |
| KaiOS | 17.2% | 2.5% |
| Android | 69.9% | 87.0% |
| iOS | 9.3% | 10.0% |