Y-Axis Favors the Brave
Tim Hardwick
We're starting to get some data points from the initial wave of iOS changes to adhere to the DMA rules in the EU. First up, that (ridiculous) browser choice screen:
With the recent iOS 17.4 update, users in the EU are presented with a splash screen upon opening Safari that allows them to choose a new default browser.
Apple is not providing just the standard browsers that have been options on iOS in the past, but a list of the most downloaded browsers on iOS devices. Some of the options include Firefox, Opera, Chrome, Brave, and Microsoft Edge.
Brave shared an image on X (Twitter) of a line graph showing the number of Brave browser installations on iOS from mid-January to early March. Daily installs hovered around 7,500 to 10,000, before jumping to just over 11,000 following the release of iOS 17.4 on March 6.
I'm not sure I would categorize 7,500 to 11,000 downloads as a "spike" (and certainly not 10,000 to 11,000), it's a nice bump, for sure, but the base is small. And the image Brave included in their post (below) to try to drive home the notion of a "spike" is crime against charts (that y-axis, lol).
The reality is that the EU has something around 100 million iPhone users. While plenty of those probably haven't upgraded to the latest OS with these changes yet, undoubtedly many tens of millions did. A bump in downloads from a screen all of those users are now forced to see that resulted in single digit thousand downloads, to me, doesn't make the point Brave is trying to make here.
