



You can see (below) the number of people having installed the app in the top numbers, and the amount of data in megabytes transferred through the app per month in the lower numbers. Looks like a lot of people are using Google Drive and Google Photos. 755만명 for Drive is 7.55 million people, or two Busan's worth.





Smartphone cloud storage usage in Korea. Image: Platum





Or are they? If you want my opinion, two things jump out at me.





Drive and Photos are installed by default on most Android phones. Maybe people just lazily use them instead of downloading a local app like Naver Cloud (in 3rd place here).



Look at the amount of data. 37MB for Google Drive? Seems on the average a lot of people are transferring just a few simple files. Naver Cloud is at 372MB/month. That's either some heavier duty usage, or maybe some users are storing videos there and streaming them to the phone (once in the cloud, the resolution may auto-reduce for streaming depending on the connection). Or maybe a few super heavy duty users are being drowned out by the masses who don't store cloud data at all. I don't see the survey details here and I'm too lazy to look it up.





A similar survey was done last year with similar results but greater discrepency (just 17MB for Google Drive, up to 578MB for Naver Cloud).





That survey revealed something else not entirely surprising. People who use Google Drive tend to stay in the Google ecosystem, and Naver Cloud users in the Naver ecosystem:





Google Drive & Naver Cloud: other often-used apps. Image: Platum





No surprises there. Anyway take all this with a grain of salt.





This was interesting. On smartphones, Google seems to dominate by double the cloud storage usage in Korea. Well, by number of users anyway.