Apple is considered the reigning smartphone seller in the U.S. thanks to its wildly popular iPhone, but Google seems to have beat out its rival with its Android operating system.
Digital analytics firm comScore released Wednesday (March 4) the results of its latest MobiLens and Mobile Metrix surveys, offering new data on the U.S. smartphone industry in January 2015.
Some results were predictable: yet again, Apple sold more of its iPhones than any other technology firm sold of their own smartphones. But the results are less definitive regarding share of the operating system market. While comScore found Google to have landed on top in January 2015, the findings contradict research from other sources.
The findings revealed that Apple remained on top of the smartphone market with a 41.3 percent share of the Original Equipment Manufacturer handset sector.
Despite Apple’s reigning supremacy, a look at the average market share in the three months ending January 2015 compared with the average in the three months ending October 2014 showed a small dip in Apple iPhone industry share, decreasing by about 0.6 percent.
HTC similarly saw a decrease in market share by 0.3 percent, and Samsung and Motorola each saw a stagnant market share in these two time periods, but LG increased its smartphone market share by 0.6 percent to 8 percent in the three months ending January 2015.
Apple’s iPhone may hold the most market share, but Google’s Android OS ranked No. 1 in smartphone platforms with 53.1 percent of the market share, the data found.
According to the research, Apple iOS saw a decrease in market share between the three month average ending in October 2014 and the three month average ending January 2015. The operating system’s market share decreased by 0.6 percent to 41.3 percent.
Google’s Android operating system, however, saw a 0.9 increase in market share ending up with 53.2 percent of the OS sector.
These findings may be surprising to some considering recent reports by Kantar Worldpanel released the same day. Kantar’s data found that smartphones running Apple’s iOS “overtook” usage of Google’s Android by 0.1 percent in the fourth quarter of 2014. If Kantar’s data is accurate, reports say it would mark the first quarter in two years that Apple’s operating system surpassed Android in the U.S.
Meanwhile, Blackberry’s operating system share fell by 0.3 percent, and Microsoft saw a slight, 0.1 percent market share increase with its operating system.
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