The iPhone may now rank third for smart phone market share, but it is still number one for banking applications.
Market researchers TowerGroup found that Android currently has 31.2 percent of the market share; 30.4 percent is owned by RIM; Apple has 24.7 percent. Trailing them by large amounts are Microsoft Window 7 phones with a paltry 8 percent and Palm devices are just at 3.2 percent.
But banks are writing applications for mobile services such as account access and online bill pay for the iPhone because that’s the phone for which most other industry developers are creating applications.
“But support for the Android is surging,” said Andy Schmidt, TowerGroup’s research director for commercial banking and payments, speaking at the company’s annual financial services conference in Boston.
Other banking-related findings: about 60 percent of phone purchases this year will be completed on smartphones and 56 percent of the 200 banks attending the conference offered neither mobile bill pay or mobile gift cards.
Side question: how much banking do you currently do on your mobile phone?
I downloaded my bank’s app, but the only time I actually used it was while on vacation to check credit card charges.
Via MacWorld UK
