iPhone marketshare continues to increase according to latest comScore reports
If you've been listening to the rumor mill lately, you might mistakenly assume that iPhone sales are plummeting. Indeed, a head-scratching and yet oft-repeated argument making the rounds these days suggests that Apple needs to behave more like Samsung if it wants to remain competitive in the smartphone market.
The cold hard data, however, paints a much different picture.
Recent data released by comScore shows that Apple's share of the smartphone market is growing while Samsung's is down ever so slightly.
From December through February, Apple's average share of the smartphone market went up from 35% to 38.9%. Samsung's share, meanwhile, went up only slightly, from 20.3% to 21.3%.
comScore's results also reveal that every other handset maker experienced a decline in marketshare over the past few months. It goes without saying that the smartphone market is currently a two horse race between Apple and Samsung. But again, the data indicates that Apple's share of the smartphone market is growing faster than Samsung's.
The story is even rosier for Apple when we look at overall platform marketshare. Here we see that Apple's share during the three month period tracked by comScore went up by 3.9% to finish at 38.9%. And while Google's Android platform still reigns supreme with a 51.7% share, it's total marketshare actually decreased by 2 percentage points.
And lest you think this is a one time occurrence, previous data released by comScore suggests a more entrenched pattern. To wit, Google's share of smartphone subscribers for the three month period ending in January of 2013 was 52.3% while Apple's was 37.8%.
So for each of the last 3 three-month periods, Google's platform marketshare has gone down sequentially while Apple's has risen from 35% to 37.8% and now 38.9%.
As a final point of interest, note how Google and Apple together account for 90.6% of all smartphone users.
