Digital 2025: Alphabet’s other bets
Alphabet continues to claim the lion’s share of global ad revenues thanks to the company’s paid search placements, but Google Search isn’t the only winner in the company’s stable.
Indeed, while search still accounts for more than half of Google’s revenues, Alphabet’s other products have been attracting an ever greater share of their respective markets.
Android recapturing ground
For starters, Android appears to have regained ground over the past year.
Back in December 2023, Statcounter reported that smartphones running the Android operating system accounted for 70.48 percent of the world’s mobile web traffic, with that figure amongst the lowest we’d seen since 2015.
However, that share figure bounced back to 73.49 percent in December 2024, delivering the platform’s highest value since September 2020.
Android performs particularly well in India, where the operating systems power more than 95 percent of all mobile devices accessing the web.
And on an equally positive note, Android accounts for more than 90 percent of mobile web traffic in Greece and Argentina.
However, Google’s mobile OS is significantly less popular in Japan, where it powers fewer than 1 in 3 of the mobile handsets accessing the web.
Android also struggles in the USA and the Nordics, while its share remains below 50 percent in the UK too.
Polished Chrome
But talking of web traffic, it’s interesting to see Google’s Chrome browser back on the ascent.
Chrome started dominating global web activity in 2016, but – while it has remained the clear market leader ever since – the browser’s share growth stagnated between 2018 and 2023.
That appears to have changed over the past 12 months though, with Chrome’s share increasing by a relative 5.6 percent between December 2023 and December 2024.
At a worldwide level, Chrome now accounts for more than two-thirds of web traffic, with the December 2024 share figure of 68.34 percent the highest we’ve seen in Statcounter’s data.
Similar to the success of Android, Chrome is particularly popular in India, where it’s responsible for more than 90 percent of the country’s web traffic.
However, Chrome’s share is even higher in the Philippines, where the browser claims roughly 94 percent market share.
Chrome isn’t quite so dominant everywhere though, even if it’s almost always the most popular choice.
For example, Chrome accounts for less than half of all web traffic in Switzerland, China, Russia, and the UK.
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This article is a sub-section of our Digital 2025 Global Overview Report.
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