Dec 18: How you use FastMail

This is the eighteenth post in the FastMail 2015 Advent Calendar. Stay tuned for another post tomorrow.

So far in this advent series, we have discussed a number of deeply technical issues, added some ‘Colour’ and looked at various design approaches.

This time we look at our most important asset – our customers!

In this blog post we will see how our customers interacted with FastMail over the past year – which browsers they used on the various platforms and how this varied across different countries.

Let’s get the midly technical information out of the way first… the graphs show the percentage breakdown between browsers within each country. The list of countries is the same across each graph and is limited to the top 25 countries by overall user access. Countries are determined by MaxMind GeoIP.

Web interface usage

Chrome has the majority of the FastMail market in Thailand, India, Brazil, Indonesia and interestingly, China. Not unexpectedly, this mirrors the overall browser market share which, in China for example, is around the 50% mark at present. Where Chinese FastMail users differ is in the use of Firefox which, as you can see in this graph and shown more obviously below, pushes Internet Explorer into third place. This contrasts markedly with the overall figures, where Internet Explorer has around 22% market share compared to FF’s 5.5% (Note: overall market share figures courtesy of statcounter.com).

We also see the likely impact of the European Union’s push for more browser choice and overall net neutrality reflected in the Firefox numbers, with European countries heading the table. Nigeria in second place likely warrants a deeper dive at a later date!

When we focus on Internet Explorer we see China leading the way, with Belgium and Norway perhaps unexpectedly towards the top of the list.

Safari, is somewhat enigmatic, both as a browser and in the graph above 🙂 but as the default Apple browser will be used, er, by default and this graph reflects that.

Mobile usage

As with the web interface, Chrome is generally the most used browser accessing our mobile site. However, it is worth noting that Chinese FastMail users do not follow this trend, coming in last. The reason for this is apparent in the next graph which shows China leading the way with iPhone use for FastMail.

The iPhone category encompasses the free FastMail app for Apple devices running on the iPhone and iPod as well as Mobile Safari accessing the web interface. Apple’s strong sales in those regions are clearly reflected in FastMail use.

FastMail’s own free Android app has good support and will no doubt increase as we continue to add features.

This post has only touched the surface of the data, stay tuned for more!