Well, that's...surprisingly different to the ComScore numbers released today(/yesterday). <a href="http://mashable.com/2013/01/04/apple-smartphone-market-share-35-percent/" rel="nofollow">http://mashable.com/2013/01/04/apple-smartphone-market-share...</a><p>Is Kantar actually tracking sales share, rather than ownership? That seems to be the only way these two sets of numbers reconcile, and is plausible from the wording of the article.
It will be very interesting to see how much of this bump they can hold in Q1 2012.<p>Also, the article downplays how much RIM got <i>slaughtered</i>. Not just "down 6%" but from 7.0 to 1.4% marketshare. Ouch.
The 53% number is for a very narrow period of time: the 12 weeks ending on Nov 25, 2012, which just coincides with the release of iPhone 5...<p>IOW: nothing to see here, move along. Like jacalata pointed out, the average market share of iOS, measured on a longer period of time, is closer to 35%: <a href="http://mashable.com/2013/01/04/apple-smartphone-market-share-35-percent/" rel="nofollow">http://mashable.com/2013/01/04/apple-smartphone-market-share...</a>
This dance is now familiar. Apple does better than 50% in their release quarter and then slowly sinks to something like 15%-20% in the months prior to the next phone's release.<p>The interesting thing is that this time Apple launched the iPhone 5 to more or less the whole world in the first 3 months and change and so most people think they're moving to a semi-annual release schedule.
I'm always entertained when these numbers are so drastically different. These guys are getting their numbers from interviews. Think about that.<p>Wikipedia used to keep a meta-table of a bunch of different sources and market share numbers, sadly that's gone.
I'm getting confused with all these stats but it's just sloppy reporting by the tech press.<p>This writer didn't even mention that this is just new smartphone sales instead of overall shares.<p>I thought VentureBeat is one of the better ones. I guess not.
There's a tendency in the "tech" press to focus on a very narrow idea of "share". When they say "market share" they are almost always talking about new unit sales. This is because it's a lot cheaper to just take reports from companies that issue them (as press releases) and then write up a story from that... and these companies are analyzing only the most recent sales (for the most party.)<p>Actual market share is something quite different, as it includes all of the previously sold, but still operating devices.<p>The share relevant to developers is still another matter, as it must take into account the operating system the developer is targetting and how many devices still in use are using that operating system.<p>So, if you're a developer for high end mobile games, you might require Android Jelly Bean and iOS 6. Thus the question of where to direct your resources would best be answered by "What is the addressable market size for these two operating systems?"<p>I don't know the answer to that, but too often the torrent of shallow media news talking about "Share" that only talks about the current sales is taken as some sort of relevant long term value.<p>It's like saying Las Vegas is cold because you took the temperature one day in January. Worse you took that temperature in a freezer, rather than out in the open air. (Eg you're not even measuring the same thing the conclusion is about.)
At what point does the DOJ declare that they have a dominant share of the smartphone market, and that there should be increased oversight of anti-competitive behavior?