Developers are constantly wondering about what kind of audience they are developing for. Are they using high end devices with large RAM? What connection are they using (for example Wi-Fi, 2G) and so on. The answers to these questions can affect product development decisions such as choosing the technologies to render the content. This report provides timeline data to inform developers on these questions for a list of countries, such as the US, Brazil, Japan, and others. Three platforms are included when data is available: Android, Windows, and ChromeOS.
Looking at the data, there might be some interesting things for developers to think about. For example, in Japan on the Android platform, the majority of users have five to eight cores, and the prevalence is quite a bit higher than in the US, and much higher than in next billion user (NBU) countries. Another example: if you look at RAM on Android, a very low percentage of Brazil devices have RAM larger than 5 GB, which is much lower than in the US, and also lower than India. We hope publishing information like this periodically will help developers have a better understanding of the Chrome user device characteristics.
This data comes from usage statistics sent to Google from Chrome installations. In Chrome, users can choose to send usage statistics and crash reports to Google to help improve Chrome's feature set and stability. Usage statistics and crash reports are enabled by default for Chrome consumer installs and can be disabled during installation or in Chrome's settings. Metrics collection is pseudonymous, and metrics are tagged by an opaque per-install identifier that is not joinable with other datasets. If the metrics collection is re-enabled, the unique identifier will also be reset. We used the data collected to calculate the various statistics in this report.