Apple continues to dominate the smartphone market while Android takes the majority share in the platform race despite a decline, comScore's latest report shows.
Apple had a favorable start this year with a dominant position in the U.S. smartphone market and an increase in market share for its iOS platform in January 2014. According to the latest market research on key trends in the mobile world by comScore released Friday, Apple continues its supremacy with 41.6 percent of the smartphone market. The start of the New Year also favored rival Samsung, as it gained 1.3 percent in the U.S. market share to reach 26.7 percent share in January.
The comScore numbers give a sketch of who had a better quarter and who lost the in the race. Though, these numbers are not official, the company is known to give reliable and accurate figures.
Motorola and HTC lost a significant market share from October 2013 to January 2014. The former Google-owned company lost 0.6 percent share, down to 6.4 percent in January. It is not clear if the Lenovo-Motorola deal has anything to do with the change. The company's Moto G smartphone was a hit and is still a trending smartphone in the mid-range category in most markets including U.S. and India. As for HTC, the company lost 1.3 percent, standing at 5.4 percent in January. The Taiwanese tech giant will likely regain lost ground with the launch of its highly anticipated HTC One successor. LG did not lose big, as it currently stands in the third position with 6.9 percent of U.S. smartphone market share, up from 6.6 percent in October 2013.
Moving on to the mobile OS trends in the U.S. in January, Android is still the king. The Google-owned mobile OS platform takes 51.7 percent of the market, but has declined 0.5 percent since October 2013. As for Apple, the iOS platform gained 1 percent over the course of last quarter. Apple iOS takes 41.6 percent of the market share. While Android and iOS took the lion's share of the OS market, BlackBerry, Microsoft and Symbian managed to slip in to the following positions in the same order.
BlackBerry has lost big in the smartphone market and still controls 3.1 percent of the OS market. This number has fallen 0.5 percent since the beginning of the last quarter in October 2013. Microsoft's Windows Phone and Symbian OS remained unchanged throughout the quarter, with 3.2 percent and 0.2 percent shares, respectively.
Here is a detailed report of comScore's October results.
