comScore US report says Android is still more popular than iOS

ComScore has finished tallying up the numbers for the first three months of 2015 and it has a few facts to share about the US mobile market. The data shows that over the said period 188.6 million people in the US were identified as owning a smartphone. This is a whopping 76.9% market penetration, which definitely gives a little perspective as to why tracking usage statistics is so important, especially in the fast-growing niche.

The results show that Android is still the most-popular smartphone OS in the country with a 52.2% market share. This, however is a whole percent lower than Q4 2014, when the same share was 53.2% and the most-likely cause of the fluctuation is Apple's iOS. It sits at close second with 43.2% up from 41.3% at the end of last year. The race is still on between the two giants and the exchange of users has also taken its toll to Microsoft's mobile OS family, which is forth with a 3.0% share and BlackBerry with 1.5%. Symbian still sits at the bottom of the chart with about 0.1% and is mostly unaffected by the commotion, which is all but expected, seeing it is now more or less retired for good.

Another metric, however, squarely puts Apple on top. The Cupertino giant is still the county's leading OEM in terms of market shares. It can now boast 43.1% of US smartphone subscribers, not coincidentally also up by 1.8% since the end of last year. The rest of the list is filled by mostly Android adopters, who share the remainder of the device market. Samsung is second with a slight decline at 28.6%, followed by LG, Motorola and HTC in that order, all grabbing below 10%.

Last, but not least, comScore also made an investigation into the market reach of certain mobile applications on both Android and iOS, combined. It turns out that Facebook is being used by a whopping 71.1% of smartphone users and that doesn't even include its separate messenger application, which can boast 51.8% by itself. Most other entries form the top of the chart are Google creations, including YouTube with 57.0%, Google Search with 51.8%, Google Play with 51.1% and Google Maps with 46.7%. It is slightly ironic that Android's central application delivery system can't come close to the popularity of Facebook, but, we do live in an age of social networks.

Source | Via