Comscore’s Latest Says Apple Top Smartphone OEM, But Android Still Top Platform In U.S.

Ahead of Apple’s WWDC event, analytics firm comScore released on Friday a new report detailing Apple’s mobile operating system iOS’s growth in the U.S. market. The reported noted that, in April, Apple ranked at the top smartphone manufacturer with a 43.1 percent market share, up from 41.3 percent in January. The next largest OEM was Samsung, with a 28.6 percent share, down from 29.3 percent at the beginning of the year.

However, comScore says that Android is still the number one mobile platform in the U.S., with a 52.2 percent share versus Apple’s 43.1 percent of the U.S. smartphone market.

But those percentages are slowing changing, the report found. Apple’s share increased to 43.1 percent while Android’s share dropped from 53.2 percent to 52.2 percent from January to April of this year. Following this ever-dominant duopoly was Microsoft with 3 percent, BlackBerry with 1.5 percent and Symbian with 0.1 percent.

Meanwhile, of the top five smartphone manufacturers, only LG saw an increase in market share, going from 8 percent to 8.4 percent during the time frame measured. Other smartphone makers, including Samsung as noted above, as well as Motorola (5.2 percent down to 4.9 percent) and HTC, (3.8 percent down to 3.7 percent) all saw declines.

Screen Shot 2015-06-08 at 11.41.10 AM

The findings come at a time when 188.6 million people in the U.S. are said to own smartphones, according to comScore’s data – or 76.9 percent mobile market penetration during the three months ending in April 2015.

The data for the new report is sourced from comScore’s MobiLens Plus and Mobile Metrix which, combined, use panel-based reporting to derive representative samples as well as census-based measurement methods to uncover insights on market trends.

The new data lines up with Apple CEO Tim Cook’s previous comments during both the Q1 and Q2 2015 earnings calls that the company is seeing an increase in Android to iPhone “switchers” in recent months. The percentages are also roughly in line with eMarketer’s prior data, which said that iPhone owners accounted for 42.3 percent of all U.S. smartphone users in 2014, up from 40.0 percent in 2013.