Apple and Google follow very different principles with their mobile platforms. Apple maintains a tightly closed system where they put their software on their own hardware whereas Google has a much more open policy. Google licenses Android to companies like Samsung, HTC and Motorola which manufacture their own hardware and run it on customized versions of Android.
While Apple’s way has plenty of advantages there is one area where it lags behind Google: sheer units sold and total market share.
Android smartphones as a whole have been dominating the iPhone in USA for quite some time now. In a latest report, its dominance has been reaffirmed. Check out the details after the jump.
The report comes from data* released by market analysis firm Kantar Worldpanel Comtech. The data shows that Android is the number one smartphone operating system in countries like the USA, France, Spain, United Kingdom, Italy and Australia.
In Spain, a whopping 84.1% of smartphones sold were running Android. The lowest sales were in Italy which still saw 49.6% sales. In every other country mentioned above, Android smartphone sales were above 50% of total smartphone sales.
In the US where we last reported Android being the top mobile operating system, well, the dominance continues. However, Kantar notes that despite having just above 50% smartphone market share, Android’s share has decreased by 6.8% last year. Apple’s current share is 37.4% which has increased by 8.7% over 2011.
Kantar claims that most of these sales come from people ditching their feature phones (almost smartphones) in smartphones which have become very cheap now. Android phones in particular come with modest prices and better technical specifications and features than offerings running other operating systems. To back this up, Kantar cites the sales of the low-end Samsung Galaxy Ace and Galaxy Y which are “selling well”.
So yes, Android does have major market share in major countries due to so many different Android phones being sold but let’s not forget that Apple gets to maintain majority of the profits** with just three iPhones: 3GS, 4 and 4S.
(via CNET)
*According to the report, the data was recorded over a period of twelve weeks that end on June 10th.
**Data released by Gartner and Oppenheimer & Co. from 2011: Android grabbed majority smartphone market share while Apple grabbed 65% of entire mobile industry’s profits.
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