See that green line? That’s Blackberry-maker Research in Motion, tanking hard and giving up the position of biggest U.S. Smartphone platform to Android. Meanwhile, guess which Cupertino-based company has regularly commanded a 25% share of all U.S. smartphones for over a year?
The data comes from analytics firm comScore, which tracks 75 million mobile subscribers in the United States. According to their data, the once dominant BlackBerry OS has now passed the torch to Android, which has jumped six percentage points from 28.7% of the total market to 34.7% in just three months.
Meanwhile, Apple’s share of the market remains steady at 25.5%… a share of the market that Apple has enjoyed with very little variation since February 2010.
What’s most impressive about Apple’s share of the smartphone market is they’ve managed to hold onto that steady fourth of the pie having released only four different models of iPhone since 2007. Android has brute forced its way to the top of the listings with countless handsets, while RIM has released dozens of iterations of their BlackBerry smartphones over the past few years.
So how well does the brute force approach work all told? It’s working for Android right now, but consider the last silicon giant to take that approach: Microsoft with Windows Mobile. In the last year, despite launching a whole new mobile operating system, Microsoft’s share of the U.S. smartphone market has halved.
Maybe there’s something to be said for focus and regularity after all?
[via GigaOM]
