Mobile Hardware Stats (and more)

Short summary: Unity’s hardware stats page now has a “mobile” section. Which is exactly what it says, hardware statistics of people playing Unity games on iOS & Android. Go to stats.unity3d.com and enjoy.

Some interesting bits:

Operating systems

iOS uptake is crazy high: 98% of the market has iOS version that’s not much older than one year (iOS 5.1 was released in 2012 March). You’d be quite okay targetting just 5.1 and up!

Android uptake is… slightly different. 25% of the market is still on Android 2.3, which is almost two and a half years old (2010 December). Note that for all practical reasons Android 3.x does not exist ;)

Windows XP in the Web Player is making a comeback at 48% of the market. Most likely explained by “Asia”, see geography below.

  • Windows Vista could be soon dropped, almost no one is using it anymore. XP… not dropping that just yet :(
  • 64 bit Windows is still not the norm.

Geography

Android is big in United States (18%), China (13%), Korea (12%), Japan (6%), Russia (4%), Taiwan (4%) – mostly Asia.

iOS is big in United States (30%), United Kingdom (10%), China (7%), Russia (4%), Canada (4%), Germany (4%) – mostly “western world”.

Looking at Web Player, China is 28% while US is only 12%!

GPU

GPU makers on Android: Qualcomm 37%, ARM 32%, Imagination 22%, NVIDIA 6%.

  • You wouldn’t guess NVIDIA is in the distant 4th place, would you?
  • ARM share is almost entirely Mali 400. Strangely enough, almost no latest generation (Mali T6xx) devices.
  • OpenGL ES 3.0 capable devices are 4% right now, almost exclusively pulled forward by Qualcomm Adreno 320.
  • On iOS, Imagination is 100% of course…

No big changes on the PC:

  • Intel slowly rising, NVIDIA & AMD flat, others that used to exist (S3 & SIS) don’t exist anymore.
  • GPU capabilities increasing, though shader model 5.0 uptake seems slower than SM4.0 was.
  • Due to rise of Windows XP, “can actually use DX10+” is decreasing :(

Devices

On Android, Samsung is king with 55% of the market. No wonder it takes majority of the Android profits I guess. The rest is split by umpteen vendors (Sony, LG, HTC, Amazon etc.).

Most popular devices are various Galaxy models. Out of non-Samsung ones, Kindle Fire (4.3%), Nexus 7 (1.5%) and then it goes into “WAT? I guess Asia” territory with Xiaomi MI-One (1.2%) and so on.

On iOS, Apple has 100% share (shocking right?). There’s no clear leader in device model; iPhone 4S (18%), iPhone 5 (16%), iPad 2 (16%), iPhone 4 (14%), iPod Touch 4 (10%).

Interesting that first iPad can be pretty much ignored now (1.5%), whereas iPad 2 is still more popular than any of the later iPad models.

CPU

Single core CPUs are about 27% on both Android & iOS. The rest on iOS is all dual-core CPUs, whereas almost a quarter of Androids have four cores!

ARMv6 can be quite safely ignored. Good.

On PC, the “lots and lots of cores!” future did not happen - majority are dual core, and 4 core CPU growth seemingly stopped at 23% (though again, maybe explained by rise of Asia?).

FAQ

How big is this data set exactly?

Millions and millions. We track the data at quarterly granularity, and in the last quarter mobile has been about 200 million devices (yes really!); whereas web player has been 36 million machines.

Why no “All” section in mobile pages, with both Android & iOS?

We’ve added hardware stats tracking on Android earlier, so there are more Unity games made with it out there. Would be totally unfair “market share” - right now, 250 million Android devices and “only” 4 million iOS devices are represented in the stats. As more developers move to more recent Unity versions, the market share will level out and then we’ll add “All” section.

Nice charts, what did you use?

Flot. It is nice! I added “track by area” option to it.

How often is stats.unity3d.com page updated?

Roughly once a month.