UC Browser is India’s Most Popular Mobile Browser with 52% Market Share

UC Browser, the flagship product of UCWeb is one of most popular mobile web browsers. In June, 2014 the company had officially merged into the Chinese largest e-commerce company Alibaba. Before this merger, Alibaba had already held a 66% stake in the company while other 34% was brought during this merging period.

By the end of 2014, UC Browser became the world’s most popular 3rd party mobile web browser. According to the StatCounter, the UC Browser had 100 million daily active users by December 2014, which by September 2015, it had occupied more than 50% of market share in mobile web browser.

One in every two mobile internet users in India uses UC Browser. When the stats from September 2014 to September 2015 are compared, the UC Browser along Google Chrome are only two browsers that have seen significant growth in user base. The major loss has been faced by the default Android browser and the Nokia’s inbuilt browser for which the user base has been decreased from 11.95% and 9.35% to 6.37% and 0.86% respectively.

statcounter.com

Since the latest Android OS comes with pre-installed Chrome app, we can expect the growth in its user base. The UC Browser also became the second largest mobile web browser globally with a market share of 16.82%. The reason behind the huge growth of UC Browser in the Indian market is because of the companies strategy of making it as an open platform.

In just one year of launching, 9Apps and 9Game had increased its user base to 140 million. With more and more collaboration with local players and bringing content is also a key factor in its growth. The UC Union from UCWeb is also the largest monetization platform in India with more than 4,000 daily campaigns.

Commenting on the achievement, Kenny Ye, MD of UCWeb India said, “India is the world’s fastest growing mobile country and our largest overseas market and we are deeply committed to it. We constantly strive to reach new users through unique customization and localization efforts, across genres. By providing a one-stop platform, UC Browser makes mobile services conveniently accessible, helping improve and reshape the mobile lifestyle of people worldwide. Going forward, we look to aid the Indian government in its ambitious mobile digital literacy campaign.”

Opera is the only other browser that looks to compete against the UC Browser. Recently, the company also launched the data saving app called ‘Opera Max.’ Xiaomi’s latest MIUI7 also integrated this Opera Max into their OS for saving the data. Samsung is the other brand that used the Opera Max in their recently launched Galaxy J2 for saving the mobile data for the smartphone users. In coming days, we can see a lot of innovation coming to the mobile browsers as we seen with web browsers.