Just how many mobiles can use HTML5 anyway?

It can hardly have escaped your attention that everyone is talking about HTML5 these days. It was the topic-du-jour for MWC, with developers, marketers, publishers and more talking excitedly about it (for an overview of what HTML5 is and what it can do, take a look at our guide). But cross-platform development company Netbiscuits has released a report that suggests HTML5 won’t be ready to rumble for quite some time yet, as the majority of devices carry little support for most of its features.

Before we start…

As in our guide above, Netbiscuits actually uses HTML5 as an umbrella term to refer to several languages that will combine for the next stage of standard web development – this includes features from CSS and JavaScript.

What’s the story?

Netbiscuits analyzed thousands of different devices that accessed mobile web information across it’s platform – and checked how many HTML5 features are supported on each one. The answer was “not all that many”.

This first picture shows the Top 5 HTML5 features that are supported by today’s devices:

While all of those are interesting and exciting mobile features, Netbiscuits claims that they are still only supported by under 50% of the top 15 devices in the markets it examined.

This next image shows the features that are partially supported

And here are the top 5 that have no support at all:

What we think?

The conclusion of the Netbiscuits report is that you shouldn’t rely too heavily on HTML5. Sure, it’s being designed to overcome mobile fragmentation… but that hasn’t stopped it suffering from fragmentation itself. And the number of devices that support HTML5 varies wildly depending on geographical location as well.

The report

It’s well worth checking out the full report – there are a lot of interesting results. One of the things that leapt out at me was the “dominating device” concept that Netbiscuits uses. A dominating device is one that gets at least 5% of the total number of page views the Netbiscuits serves – and at any time there are usually only two or three devices that count as “dominant”. Since 2009, only two device makers have made it into that category – Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch, and RIM’s Blackberry Curve. As of yet, there are no dominant Android devices – though the Netbiscuits report only goes as far as November 2010, so perhaps we’ll see a market shift in the next report. The report shows that the Motorola Droid and Samsung Galaxy S are both catching up… but even combined, they’ve got nothing approaching the market share of even the iPod Touch.