While analysts brawl over what Apple’s record-setting sales figures for the iPhone 5S and 5C mean, market share figures released today by comScore show that Apple has already made gains on Android over the summer, before the release of its new smartphones.
Apple remained the top smartphone OEM with 40.7 percent of the U.S. market, growing by 1.5 percentage points over the thre- month period ending in May. The iPhone 5 made its first appearance on T-Mobile this summer, which may have driven some of Apple’s growth, as well as Apple covering the iPhone under its back-to-school promotion for the first time this year. Those figures square with numbers put out by Kantar Worldpanel ComTech, showing sales of new iPhone handsets made up 39.3 percent of all smartphone sales during the summer.
Meanwhile, Samsung continued to consolidate the Android userbase under its umbrella, growing by 1.3 percentage points to 24.3 percent of the total market, while both HTC and Motorola lost market share, dropping to 7.4 and 6.9 percent market share respectively. LG held on to its 6.7 percent share of the market.
While Nokia didn’t make the top 5 OEMs, Windows Phone saw some modest growth, expanding to 3.2 percent of the total smartphone market. Android held on to its majority share of the smartphone market, but dropped eight tenths of a percentage point to 51.6 percent of the market, while Apple surged up to 40.7 percent of the market.
ComScore’s numbers show more bad news for troubled smartphone maker BlackBerry, which dropped to a measly 4 percent of the total smartphone market, down from 5.9 percent at the start of this year.
It’s hard to say yet what this shift means for the long-term future of the smartphone market. Google is rumored to be working with LG on a Nexus 5 phone that would be released later this year, while we haven’t yet seen how the launch iPhone 5S and 5C have affected Apple’s market share.
Previously on GeekWire: iPhone shows summer sales gains over Android in U.S.
