comScore today released the results of its monthly rolling survey of U.S. mobile phone users for the November-January period, finding that Apple's smartphone marketshare rose 3.5 percentage points between October and January, up to 37.8% of both U.S. smartphone platform and hardware sales.
Samsung was second in hardware makers with 21.4%, up from 19.5% three months earlier. HTC and Motorola both experienced significant drops in market share, while LG gained slightly.
Google's Android was the largest smartphone platform with 52.3% of smartphone platform share, down from 53.6% three months ago. Android, BlackBerry, Microsoft and Symbian all lost share, to the benefit of Apple. As a result, Apple and Google control more than 87 percent of the smartphone market.
Notably, comScore's data tracks installed user base rather than new handset sales, making it more reflective of real-world usage but slower to respond to shifting market trends than some other studies.
While the iPhone 17 Pro and iPhone 17 Pro Max are not expected to launch until September, there are already plenty of rumors about the devices.
Below, we recap key changes rumored for the iPhone 17 Pro models as of March 2025:
Aluminum frame: iPhone 17 Pro models are rumored to have an aluminum frame, whereas the iPhone 15 Pro and iPhone 16 Pro models have a titanium frame, and the iPhone ...
Wednesday March 26, 2025 4:53 pm PDT by Juli Clover
Apple regularly refreshes the MacBook Pro models, and a new version that uses M5 series chips is in the works. Apple just finished refreshing most of the Mac lineup with M4 chips, and now it's time for the M5. Rumors suggest that we could see the first M5 MacBook Pro models this fall.
Design
There have been no rumors of a design update for the M5 MacBook Pro models that are coming this...
Wednesday March 26, 2025 12:19 pm PDT by Juli Clover
Apple is going all out with promotions for the popular Severance Apple TV+ show today, and as of right now, you'll find a new "Lumon Terminal Pro" listed on Apple's Mac site.
The Lumon Terminal Pro is designed to look similar to the machines that Severance employees like Mark S. and Helly R. use for macrodata refinement. The Terminal features a blue keyboard, a small display with wide...
Thursday March 27, 2025 1:59 pm PDT by Joe Rossignol
In the mid-to-late 2000s, Facebook was all about staying connected with friends and family. However, as the social media platform added new features and grew over time, that core experience began to get drowned out.
That changes starting now, according to Meta, which today introduced a new feature that will "bring back the joy" of classic Facebook.
Specifically, Meta has redesigned the...
Apple is expected to release iOS 18.4 to the general public as soon as next week, following more than a month of beta testing.
Apple's website says some iOS 18.4 features will be released in "early April," so the update should be out as early as Tuesday, April 1.
Apple this week seeded the iOS 18.4 Release Candidate, which is typically the final beta version, barring the discovery of any...
Wednesday March 26, 2025 4:06 am PDT by Tim Hardwick
Update 7:25 pm: Based on comments from our forums, it appears the original Weibo post may have been mistranslated and "8K" actually refers to the high price of the device rather than 8K video recording capabilities. The iPhone 16 Pro currently starts at 7,999 yuan in China.
Our original article follows below.
Apple's forthcoming iPhone 17 Pro models are capable of shooting 8K video, up...
With the second release candidate of iOS 18.4 that Apple seeded out today, the company finally provided us with release notes that give a full rundown on what to expect.
There's an Apple Vision Pro app, new Apple Intelligence features for notifications and additional language support, plus an Apple News Food feature for Apple News+ subscribers, and several updates that should improve the...
Thursday March 27, 2025 7:45 am PDT by Joe Rossignol
The upcoming iOS 18.4 update for the iPhone adds an Ambient Music feature to Control Center. Below, we take a closer look at how it works.
iOS 18.4 is currently in beta, so the Ambient Music feature is not widely available yet. The update will likely be released to the general public next week.
To use the feature on iOS 18.4, open Control Center and tap on the plus sign in the top-left...
Thursday March 27, 2025 4:21 am PDT by Tim Hardwick
Last week, we covered a report claiming that Apple's book-style foldable iPhone (or "iPhone Fold," as we are provisionally calling it here) will use liquid metal hinges to improve durability and help minimize screen creasing. Today, a Chinese leaker provided more details on the properties of this hinge material that help to clarify why Apple chose it for its first foldable device.
According...
I really don't think it's right to call android the largest "smartphone platform", because:
1. Really its "mobile platform" and when you look at the post-PC era, tablets, namely the iPad Market is a big chunk of mobil devices, and when you include these numbers- the iPad has really dominant share making iOS the dominant platform. Looking just at "smartphones" is selective reporting to try and exclude the market where Apple has had the most success, skewing the numbers in favor of android.
2. Android is hugely fragmented. iOS devices are mostly all running the latest iOS software and even ones that aren't can all run apps without modification. This is not true on android where covering %80 of the market requires changing your app to support 167!!! different devices.
3. I don't consider android to really be a platform, simply because it is so compromised. As a ripoff of iOS they had to rush it to market and in doing so compromised a lot of functionality.
4. Android is primarily sold to feature phone buyers as if it were a featurephone. These people walk in to get "a phone" and get sold android by the weenies at the carriers store... but they don't use them for apps or for even browsing the web, which is why the web stats on android are so pitiful. Android is really a feature phone operating system (hence the fragmentation and incompatibility)
5. You'd be just as correct to lump all the other Linux derivatives together and claim that there's a "linux smartphone platform".
6. We don't have real hard numbers for shipping devices for android. Amazon doesn't publish actual numbers. Google doesn't publish actual numbers. Samsung doesn't publish actual numbers. There's a lot of hype and BS claims that these devices are selling in huge numbers, but when samsung was forced to report actual sales in the lawsuit last year, it turns out that when journalists were claiming big sales the reality was pitiful. Most of these "sales" are actually non-android featurephones also sold by these companies who don't break them out because they want to seem more dominant than they are.
Get me real numbers reported in annual or quarterly reports that would result in an investigation by the SEC and charges of fraud if they were made up-- and use those.
Apple provides them. Until android manufacturers are willing to report the numbers under penalty of perjury like Apple does, they're just PR smoke, nothing more. (or analysts "projections")
These stats are being distorted by the propaganda of android fans who claim that it is a platform, and a smartphone platform at that and that it is dominant
Considering that there are only 6 iPhone models and at least 1000 Android phones I wouldn't say that 37.8% (iOS) to 52.3% (Android) is too bad of a margin
People use iPhones more because they last longer. It's not built from really poor quality plastic (ala Samsung). It's got software updates for at least twice or thrice as long as Android based devices (exception are Nexus devices). And let's not forget there are better quality apps on iOS in general. Oh and iOS is easier to use and the interface is consistent across multiple devices, multiple versions of the OS.
BTW - "rushed to market" ? Yeah - maybe MAYBE OS1.0 - but now? Not so much. ICS and JB weren't "rushed" no matter how much you really want to say it.
What functionality has been compromised in Android. Name some.
Your rationalization is hilarious.
Lastly - why so defensive and dismissive? Someone at Google kidnap a loved one?
I really don't think it's right to call android the largest "smartphone platform", because:
1. Really its "mobile platform" and when you look at the post-PC era, tablets, namely the iPad Market is a big chunk of mobil devices, and when you include these numbers- the iPad has really dominant share making iOS the dominant platform. Looking just at "smartphones" is selective reporting to try and exclude the market where Apple has had the most success, skewing the numbers in favor of android.
2. Android is hugely fragmented. iOS devices are mostly all running the latest iOS software and even ones that aren't can all run apps without modification. This is not true on android where covering %80 of the market requires changing your app to support 167!!! different devices.
3. I don't consider android to really be a platform, simply because it is so compromised. As a ripoff of iOS they had to rush it to market and in doing so compromised a lot of functionality.
4. Android is primarily sold to feature phone buyers as if it were a featurephone. These people walk in to get "a phone" and get sold android by the weenies at the carriers store... but they don't use them for apps or for even browsing the web, which is why the web stats on android are so pitiful. Android is really a feature phone operating system (hence the fragmentation and incompatibility)
5. You'd be just as correct to lump all the other Linux derivatives together and claim that there's a "linux smartphone platform".
6. We don't have real hard numbers for shipping devices for android. Amazon doesn't publish actual numbers. Google doesn't publish actual numbers. Samsung doesn't publish actual numbers. There's a lot of hype and BS claims that these devices are selling in huge numbers, but when samsung was forced to report actual sales in the lawsuit last year, it turns out that when journalists were claiming big sales the reality was pitiful. Most of these "sales" are actually non-android featurephones also sold by these companies who don't break them out because they want to seem more dominant than they are.
Get me real numbers reported in annual or quarterly reports that would result in an investigation by the SEC and charges of fraud if they were made up-- and use those.
Apple provides them. Until android manufacturers are willing to report the numbers under penalty of perjury like Apple does, they're just PR smoke, nothing more. (or analysts "projections")
These stats are being distorted by the propaganda of android fans who claim that it is a platform, and a smartphone platform at that and that it is dominant
