That’s a nice and (irrelevant) statistic. No one targets a “global” audience with a website. If I’m targeting North America, Europe, or Japan, why do I care that a billion people in India use Android phones? Even in countries where iOS is a sliver of the overall population like China and India, if you want to reach the affluent population, you still need to target iOS users.
How fast do you think someone creating a website in the US will get fired if they said they are going to ignore iOS users because iOS is only 15% of the global market?
If iOS didn’t matter do you think Google would be paying Apple a reported $9 billion a year to be the default search engine?
North America is about the only significant market where iOS has a ton of market share, and the world is not North America. If you're targeting Europe, iOS has only 25% [1]. Not sure why you said Japan instead of Asia, but iOS market share there is less than 15%; even worse than it is worldwide [2].
People don't have their browser choices etched in stone, and Google's services are a powerful form of persuasion. If they work in Chrome but not other browsers, people will just switch to Chrome.
It's not 2009 anymore. iOS simply doesn't give Apple the power to stop Google here.
And that still doesn’t negate my other point, if you exclude iOS, you miss the most affluent users. Who do you think is the most profitable market segment? People buying $50 Android phones or people buying $700 iPhones?
Apple doesn’t have to “stop” Google. If Apple doesn’t support it, either web developers wont use it because no one is going to give up their most affluent customers or they are going to be forced to write an app.
Again, if I’m writing a website for the US, why do I care about the worldwide market share?
> And that still doesn’t negate my other point, if you exclude iOS, you miss the most affluent users. Who do you think is the most profitable market segment? People buying $50 Android phones or people buying $700 iPhones?
If your service is free and you monetize by selling users' data, they're all the same. You don't have to sell things to your users to make money. Just look at Google!
> Again, if I’m writing a website for the US, why do I care about the worldwide market share?
Again, the world is not the US. If I'm making a website for Europe or China [1] or South Korea [2] or Vietnam [3], why do I care about the US or Japan market share?
If your service is free and you monetize by selling users' data, they're all the same. You don't have to sell things to your users to make money. Just look at Google!
Because users in the rest of the world who are not as affluent aren’t as attractive to advertisers. You are already seeing it with Google. Google just announced a year over year decline in net income as ad sales increased a lot slower than acquisition costs.
Google doesn’t “sell users data” it sells access to users to advertisers based on their data. Advertisers aren’t willing to pay as much for users data for much less affluent users
Again, the world is not the US. If I'm making a website for Europe or China [1] or South Korea [2] or Vietnam [3], why do I care about the US or Japan market share?
If you combine South Korea and Vietnam you probably have the GDP of a midsize state in the US. In China, if you want to reach the growing middle and upper class - you still have to support iOS.
> If they work in Chrome but not other browsers, people will just switch to Chrome.
On iOS, Chrome is just a wrapper around WebKit. You can't ship third-party web rendering engines on iOS. So if Apple doesn't implement this tag for Safari, Chrome on iOS won't have it either.
