Now that the HTML5 set of standards has reached Recommendation status (the W3C's way of saying it's now a published standard) the DeviceAtlas team thought we'd take a look at how support for HTML5 has grown in shipping mobile devices over the past few years. We have a wealth of device data to draw from since we've been tracking devices ever since mobile phones could access the web.
This chart shows the number of devices released each year (using the DeviceAtlas yearReleased property) that support varying numbers of HTML5 properties. So what does this mean? Essentially this chart is showing that support for HTML5 in mobile devices is growing rapidly. The changes really started in 2009 and ramped strongly from there.
Hover over chart areas to see detailed data points.
Note: This chart counts newly-released devices rather than the overall volume on the market. Thus the cumulative volume of devices released with significant levels of HTML5 support will paint a more dramatic picture.
Within this growth story, however, there is a much fragmentation. The overall progression is strong and clear but content publishers should be careful not to assume too much of their users' devices since, even in recent years, many devices are released with little or no support for HTML5. If you really want your content to reach a wide audience you should ensure to check the properties of the device before sending it content.
This data is taken from the standard DeviceAtlas database. The HTML5 properties in question can be seen on our properties page and include the following:
HTML Audio, Canvas, Inline SVG, SVG, HTML Video, CSS Animations, CSS Columns, CSS Transforms, CSS Transitions, JS Application Cache, JS Geo Location, JS Indexeddb, JS Local Storage, JS Session Storage, JS Web GL, JS Web Sockets, JS Web SQL Database, JS Web Workers, JS Device Orientation, JS Device Motion, JS Touch Events, JS Query Selector
These properties are available to any DeviceAtlas license holder via the Enterprise or Cloud APIs. You can also browse these properties with our Data Explorer and plot their coverage by country, OS etc. As an example, this page dives into more detail on the CSS Transforms property.