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]
John Brownlee is a writer for Fast Company, and a contributing writer here at CoM. He has also written for Wired, Playboy, Boing Boing, Popular Mechanics, VentureBeat, and Gizmodo. He lives in Boston with his wife and two parakeets. You can follow him here on Twitter.
21 responses to “RIM Tanks, Android Rises And iPhone Reigns Supreme In U.S. Smartphone Market”
Apple has has no growth in the past year while Google has a 10% lead on them. How does that make apple “reign supreme?”
“iPhone Reigns Supreme”, that will be doublespeak for “iPhone getting spanked by Android” will it?
Really who pays you write this rubbish?
(BTW I use (and love using) an iPhone, iPad and Macbook)
Microsoft has 7%? I am surprised there are that many Microsoft employees in the world.
Looks like RIM is still ahead of iPhone in the US. And WAY ahead internationally.
I was thinking the same thing…the author misses the whole point of the term “reigns supreme”. There have been a lot of terrible posts (content and titles alike) lately and it’s making me think twice about having CoM in my google reader feed. There needs to be some better editorial oversight around here.
Typo…
First thing I noticed when reading the graph is Nov-10 then jump to Dec-11 then Jan-11…
What a crap… Please fix it…
i was gonna ask a question but @770104a41ce1af3b7e715450724abb55:disqus already got to it.
no surprise here, article written by Brownlee.
You FanDroid zombies don’t get it. Iphone has 25 percent of the market with ONE brilliantly popular phone (well the 3GS is still available too…so 2). SpamDroid stuck on every 2nd phone released (a few decent ones, a lot of crap ones, none as good as the Iphone…The spamdroid world is full of shovelware apps, fragmentation on OS upgrade path and a generally chaotic ecosystem), for people looking for cheap cheap phones will OF COURSE land more market share (the Brute Force approach mentioned). You’re the Windoze of the 21st century…utilitarian but flawed and Iphone is the Mac OS of the 21st century – elegant and appealing to people who like things that “just work” without fiddling under the hood. Or put it this way, McDonald’s has the most “market share” in the restaurant world…does that make it “best”?
The points you make are all valid, however they miss the point that most of the people replying make. The author asserts that the graph demonstrates iOS reigning supreme over other mobile operating systems. It doesn’t, android has the greatest Market share and has demonstrated explosive growth over the past year. iOS’ Market share is stable, possibly even stagnant. The debate is not about which is the better operating system it is about which of the following is true:
1: The author lacks the critical faculties to draw the correct conclusions about Market share from the data
2: The author is sycophantic to the point of delusion with respect to Apple
3: Apple sponsored the author to write this piece.
For the record I love iOS own an iPhone, iPad and MacBook, so I am not an Android fanboy
android is coming so fast behind apple