ComScore on US Smartphone Market Share: Despite Late iPhone 4S Surge, Android Closes Out Q4 Ahead of All
Comscore have released their Q4 2011 numbers for smartphone market share in the United States. Earlier reports suggested Apple would take a great chunk of the share back from Android with the launch of the iPhone 4S, and while they did have a great spurt to close the year out it didn’t hurt Android as much as some might have thought it would.
They found that Android still grew 2.5% more over the previous quarter at 47.3% vs 44.8%. Apple, on the other hand, grew 2.2% more over the previous quarter with 29.6% vs 27.4%. Everyone else is on the decline, a trend that has held true for quite some time now. RIM now only owns 16% and despite what Steve Ballmer would have you believe, Microsoft is falling, too, at 4.7%.
RIM has recently shaken things up by getting a new CEO who wishes to inspire change for Blackberry OS and within their ranks overall. Needing developers in order to create a robust apps marketplace for users, they’ve recently began poaching Android users by making it easy for developers to port their applications to Blackberry. They’re even offering developers free devices for doing so.
Microsoft is relying on Windows Phone 7 as it is. They believe they have a very good operating system, and they do, but it remains to be seen whether or not users will be willing to leave Android and iOS.
Some suggest that Windows’s slow start is not an issue as Android suffered the same slow start only to become the leading and fastest growing operating system worldwide. It remains to be seen if history will repeat itself. Take a look at the full slate above.