Theory time: StatCounter says India has 54% of unknown desktop OS. What could it be?

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Every StatCounter stat about desktop OS market share has a small portion of “Unknown”, but for India, this portion is the majority. It makes me wonder, because how can such a majority statistic be unknown? And what if it’s mostly Linux like what Steven from ZDNET argued about the U.S. desktop market share statistics [Source]?

To get some disclaimers out of the way:

  • StatCounter has only 0.3% market share in website analytics [Source]. It is not used on big sites like Youtube, Wikipedia, Google etc. The dataset from Google Analytics would have a way better picture, but they don’t publish their statistics openly, and Google Trends only does search query. Google Analytics statistics could be very divergent.
  • StatCounter does not gauge market share, it gauges visits. Although these correlate, they do not have a causal relationship. Plus some desktop systems might not be used to browse the web. And visits fluctuate per set of months.

I’m curious to know your thoughts on this!

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I think the bigger question is whether the data StatCounter provides is even statistically significant with that market share.

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Statistical significance aside, what would be the cause for any visits to be registered as “Unknown” by embedded website analytics such as StatCounter? Do you have any theories?
And the U.S. desktop share percentage statistic lines up very well with the Steam Hardware Survey btw

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Moreover, there is counter evidence that StatCounter is not failing to recognize some older version of Windows or Mac or misjudging Android as a desktop OS, because those seem to be very much visible to the tracker on these pages:

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Apple has an issue with some Catalina versions, but do you really expect India to be taken by storm by premium priced Apple devices? Unlikely

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