• by Ray Schultz , Columnist, January 10, 2022

Apple Mail Privacy Protection’s market share jumped by almost 57% from November to December 2021, and now accounts for 40.6% of all email opens, according to an update posted on Friday by Litmus. 

Despite that leap, Litmus wonders whether MPP growth is slowing down. The increase from October to November was 82% — to 25.9%.  

But that’s cold comfort — MPP was introduced only in September 2021 and consumers are still adopting it. And it is close to the predictions made early on, which were seen by some observers as alarmist.  

Apart from that, Apple utterly dominates the email client market, with a 57.4% share in December, versus 30.4% for Gmail. Gmail dropped from 31.6% and Outlook from 4.7% to 4.1%.

Apple’s clients include Apple MPP (41%), Apple iPhone (10.7%), Apple Mail (5.0%) and Apple iPad (0.6%). 

MPP has “now taken the top spot for reading environment, surpassing webmail which was traditionally in the lead,”  Litmus notes. In contrast, Webmail now generates 35.6% of email opens, mobile, 13.7%, desktop 9.1% and other 1.%. 

Apple Mail leads in desktop opens — 54%, versus 44.7% for Outlook, 1.1% for Windows Live and 0.2% for other systems. 

And, Apple iPhone pulls 77.6%, and Google Android 14.5%. The remainder is split between Apple iPad and the other category.  

Gmail, of course, dominates the webmail category in opens:

• Gmail — 89.6%
• Yahoo Mail — 7.2% 
• Outlook.com — 2.9%
• Other — 0.3% 

In another metric, light mode now makes up 74.3% of opens, versus 25.7% for dark mode.

Here are the top 10 email clients overall:

1. Apple — 57.4%
2. Gmail — 30.4%
3. Outlook — 4.1% 
4. Yahoo Mail — 2.5% 
5. Google Android — 2.0% 
6. Outlook.com — 1.0%
7. Samsung Mail — 0.4% 
8. Windows Live Mail — 0.1% 
9. Web.de — 0.04%
10. GMX — 0.04%

The statistics in this report are based on email client market share stats pulled from over a billion email opens, anonymously collected and aggregated with Litmus Email Analytics.