Apple Gaining Market Share over Android, suggests new Kantar Report

According to Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, Apple’s newest phones, the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus, have improved iOS smartphones sales’ figures for the fall while causing Android’s figures to drop as a result.

Its latest 12-week smartphone figures, from September to November 2014, have seen Android losing market share in the United States since September 2013.

In fact, this does not come as a surprise even though the Android platform has had ‘phablet’ devices for years but mostly owing to the fact that both these devices – Apple 6 and 6 Plus – were released in September. This has given iOS users to take a good look at the competition before owning their own palm-stretching phones.

Apple’s annual smartphone release cycle usually requires users to wait and which is what contributes to a large of number of users buying a new iPhone. Of course, if it is too long, some of them make the switch to Android phones – which has stayed at 18 percent. Alternatively, there aren’t many Android owners who have been interested in new Apple smartphones either.

The figures also show that Android’s dominance in the US market is slowly dropping and has been by 2 percentage year on year. Specifically, Android had 50.4 percent share of sales since September 2013 to 48.4 percent this year.

iOS, on the other hand, increased by 4.3 percentage points and was at 47.4 percent in terms of market share in the United States.

Apart from Android, Apple is taking share from smaller players such as Windows Phone and BlackBerry where the Others category dropped by a further 0.6 percentage points.

This drop in share for Android has been reflected in not only the United States but also Europe and Australia. That said, in China and Japan, the reverse trend was evident.