Today PacketZoom published an analysis of how various CDNs are performing in the top 100 websites as compared to the top 100 mobile apps, revealing some difference between the two arenas. Whereas Akamai is still dominating the market for websites, Amazon CloudFront is leading other CDNs among the U.S.’s top 100 mobile apps.Â
According to Alexa, Google, YouTube, Facebook, and Amazon are some of the most frequented websites, and PacketZoom’s top 100 sites still lend an unsurprisingly large amount of support to Akamai, who leads the market with a 35.3% share. Fastly (12.9%), Verizon EdgeCast (11.8%) and Amazon CloudFront (9.4%) comprised the next largest shares, along with sites that self-service their CDN needs (11.8%). The remainder of the market is saturated with numerous smaller players, although a few sizable shares go to CloudFront, Rackspace, and the Chinese companies Baidu and Sohu. The chart below provides a breakdown of PacketZoom’s analysis.
CDN Market Share – Top 100 Websites
Topping the list of mobile apps on Google Play were Facebook Messenger, Facebook, Snapchat, and Bitmoji, and PacketZoom’s analysis of CDN providers for their top 100 mobile apps showed a very different picture than the web landscape. Amazon CloudFront dominated the market with a 40% share and Akamai trailing far behind (14.1% share). Despite Amazon’s leadership of the cloud arena, CloudFront has seemed incredibly unlikely to ever threaten Akamai’s lock on the CDN industry, but mobile is a rapidly changing ecosystem. As things continue to evolve in the mobile landscape, more players will likely emerge, but for now, the mobile market is decidedly less saturated with small players than the web market is. Amazon has an advantage in this arena in that it integrates well with other AWS products, which are bound to be increasingly popular for mobile as Serverless Compute continues to take off.
CDN Market Share for Top 100 Apps – US
This information is of course a boon to PacketZoom, whose CDN enhancement services run in the same data centers as Amazon CloudFront. As a result, apps that use the two in conjunction with each other gain increased performance by sparing themselves the need for an additional hop to the CDN edge server.
Perhaps the clearest takeaway, however, from PacketZoom’s analysis is that in the constantly evolving mobile app arena, the rules for web services no longer apply and nothing is to be taken for granted.