Apple Devices Dominate In-Flight, Tablet Traffic

The tablet is becoming the device of choice in the air. According to Gogo, 35 percent of in-flight Internet usage happens on tablets, 32 percent on smartphones. The remaining 33 percent is on laptops.

It’s easy to see why tablets are becoming the preferred in-flight work and entertainment device. Economy travelers are often unable to open their laptops when the seats in front of them recline. (As an aside, here’s an aggressive response to that problem.)

The majority of in-flight mobile devices running on Gogo are on iOS (84 percent), while 16 percent are Android, which has grown from only 3.2% in 2011. Among smartphones, 73 percent are the iPhone and 26 percent are Android handsets. BlackBerry and Windows have “less than 1 percent of the devices being used to connect in air.”

Among all iOS devices, “59 percent of passengers connect using the iPad, 36 percent using the iPhone and 5 percent using the iPod touch.”

Interestingly, Gogo shows the top browsers in the air being: Safari, IE, Chrome and Firefox in that order (with no share breakdown). The fact that IE is number two shows that it dominates PC-based in-flight access. There is no IE on virtually any of the non-PC devices accessing the Internet during flight.

Separately, ad network Chitika released new tablet traffic data yesterday. The company said that the iPad is responsible for 80 percent of the traffic generated by tablets (US and Canada); however, Apple’s share is down roughly 7 points since December.

After the iPad, the top traffic generator is Kindle Fire, followed by Samsung Galaxy tablets and the Nexus 7. Microsoft Surface has a 0.4 percent share of tablet traffic, according to Chitika.

Below are the top three tablets showing up on Chitika’s network and the changes in traffic distribution over the past several months.