Outside of the U.S. and Italy, iOS picked up ground on Android over the course of a year

In the U.S., the three months that ended this August were not good for Apple. According to Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, the market share of iOS was as its lowest point since August 2014. There actually was a good reason for the decline. Consumers were waiting for the Apple iPhone 6s and Apple iPhone 6s Plus to drop. This was borne out in a poll conducted by Kantar, that showed back in August that 11% of iOS owners planned on buying a new phone in the next three months; 87% of them said that the iPhone was the handset that they wanted to buy.

In the U.S., 29% of Samsung smartphone owners upgraded to a new device during the three months ended in August. 23% went with the Samsung Galaxy S5, and 4% took the new Samsung Galaxy S6. Only 1% bought the Samsung Galaxy S6 edge.

Elsewhere around the world, comparing the three months ended in August 2015 with the three months ended in August 2014, it was iOS picking up market share on Android. Even in countries like Germany, where Android owns a huge percentage of smartphone sales, Google's open source OS lost a percentage of the market during that one year period, while iOS added market share. The only other country tracked by Kantor where this phenomenon didn't take place, besides the U.S., was Italy where Android tacked on an additional 1.8 percentage points in market share during the year, and iOS was flat.

For the three months ended in August 2015, Android owned 66.9% of the smartphone market in the states. That was a gain of 2.5 percentage points from the three month period that ended in August 2014. During the same time period, the share belonging to iOS declined 2.1 pp to 28.5%. In Australia, there was quite a swing as iOS tacked on 8.5 percentage points during the year, and Android's slice of the smartphone pie declined 11.5 pp. That happened to be the largest increase for iOS, and the largest decrease for Android over the stated time period.



source: KantarWorldPanelComTech via BGR