I was looking through a pretty interesting site that tracks internet browser usage trends and naturally was curious about mobile browser statistics in India. Opera was and is #1. Nokia is #2. But the real story was a contender coming out of nowhere to capture nearly 18% of the market to be close to being #2. What is this browser making giant inroads into the Indian mobile user base? UC Browser.
Source: StatCounter Global Stats - Mobile Browser Market Share
Digging deeper, I found it's not the upstart that I assumed it to be. Apparently, UC is the most popular mobile browser in China. That's all well and good but this is a Chinese export doing well in India. Normally, all I hear are stories about their own special versions of Twitter, Groupon and Facebook for internal consumption. A Chinese browser doing well outside China? That's curious,to say the least. What is driving this adoption? I poked around till I found their patent page which, to me, appears to doing a much better job of selling the browser than their main page! I was surprised to see that the UC Browser has a lot of features such as page compression to save bandwidth and cloud-accelerated browsing. So, for a cost-conscious country like India, I can see the appeal. If I saw "save on bandwidth consumption", I'd just skip to the end and click the big bright download button.
Digging deeper, I found it's not the upstart that I assumed it to be. Apparently, UC is the most popular mobile browser in China. That's all well and good but this is a Chinese export doing well in India. Normally, all I hear are stories about their own special versions of Twitter, Groupon and Facebook for internal consumption. A Chinese browser doing well outside China? That's curious,to say the least. What is driving this adoption? I poked around till I found their patent page which, to me, appears to doing a much better job of selling the browser than their main page! I was surprised to see that the UC Browser has a lot of features such as page compression to save bandwidth and cloud-accelerated browsing. So, for a cost-conscious country like India, I can see the appeal. If I saw "save on bandwidth consumption", I'd just skip to the end and click the big bright download button.
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