Let me share with you a few interesting technology trends from India and Pakistan, based on 3-million pageviews of a local website from the past 30 days:
Overall-: 61% access via mobile — 39% via desktop
India—: 70% access via mobile — 30% via desktop
Pakistan: 34% access via mobile — 66% via desktop
India and Pakistan make up for 70% of the traffic on the website in question, sharing an almost equal 35% share.
Indians are increasingly browsing the web using their mobile/smart phones, while most Pakistanis still (have to) do with conventional computers. Smartphones and 3G make the difference, I suppose.
Considering the above statistic—that more than 50% of visitors to a typical local website are coming from smartphones—it is surprising that many/most of our top-viewed websites are not responsive: meaning they do not adapt to the user screen. WhatMobile, for instance, is hugely popular in Pakistan but offers terrible readability on mobile phones.
In 2014, this shouldn’t be a big deal. The web-technologies give us all the tools to make a website automatically change its interface according to the device it is being viewed on.
Here’s to hope that more people get their hands on smartphones and more local websites support responsive designs.