Oliver Haslam on August 5, 2021, 1:01 am

Apple’s HomePod Market Share Is Still Poor Compared To Amazon And Google

Apple’s HomePod and HomePod mini continue to struggle to find a foothold in a market dominated by Amazon and Google, according to a new report.

Numbers shared by CIRP have both Amazon and Google dominating the market, with Apple’s smart speakers almost nowhere to be seen. The Facebook Portal is also significantly down the pecking order, not that anyone is likely to be too surprised by that.

CIRP claims that the US smart speaker market consists of around 126 million devices as of June this year, with Amazon’s Echo devices being the majority — 69%, to be exact.

Part of the reason for that, CIRP suggests, is that both Amazon and Google seem particularly good at getting multiple speakers into homes.

Amazon also has a larger share of smart speaker households. Based on CIRP analyses and accounting for houses with multiple devices (below), we estimate over 50 million US homes have at least one Amazon Echo device and about 23 million homes having at least one Google Nest/Home device. Manufacturers seek to sell multiple devices to consumers, to create a greater barrier to switching to competing systems. By this measure, Amazon has succeeded, with multiple devices in over 20 million US households. For comparison, Google has about 8 million multiple Nest/Home device households and Apple has only two million with more than one HomePod.

By contrast, Apple’s HomePod and HomePod mini make up less than 10% of the market, a number that has likely been helped of late by the relatively recent HomePod mini launch. The $99 speaker is a much easier buy for most people when compared to the costly HomePod — a speaker that is no longer offered for sale.