Q1 Smartphone Market Share Winners And Losers

Smartphone Winners And Losers

ComScore's quarterly report, a national survey of mobile subscribers age 13 or older, for the first quarter of 2013 comes with some interesting questions about the U.S. smartphone market. Is Apple losing market share? Are iPhone sales slowing down? How much of the market does Android own? And which Android smartphone maker is on top? For those answers and more, check out ComScore's results.

The iPhone Is Still King

According to ComScore, Apple is still the smartphone king in the U.S., winning 39 percent of subscribers in the first quarter, up 2.7 percentage points from the previous quarter. Despite Apple's sagging stock price and concerns about the company's future growth potential, the iPhone still reigns supreme in the U.S.

Samsung Is Rising

Apple rival Samsung came in second with 21.7 percent of the market, up 0.7 points sequentially -- and that's without the benefit of the company's new Galaxy S4 smartphone, which launched last month and should give Samsung a bigger boost this quarter. The Korean technology giant has been on a roll recently and has emerged as the most serious challenger to Apple's dominance in the mobile device market.

Android Handset Makers Slip

Three of the biggest Android smartphone makers -- HTC, Motorola and LG Electronics -- all saw their subscriber share decline slightly in the first quarter. HTC's share dropped the most at 1.2 percentage points to 9 percent of the U.S. market, followed by Motorola, with a 0.6 drop to 8.5 percent, and LG, with a 0.3 point drop to 6.8 percent.

BlackBerry Doesn't Crack The Top 5

BlackBerry has been staging a comeback of sorts with its BlackBerry 10 operating system and new Z10 and Q10 smartphones. But in terms of the OEM devices, the Canadian smartphone company can't even make it into the top five of ComScore's ranking. BlackBerry's smartphone and mobile OS share, which are the same number, fell 1.2 percentage points sequentially to 5.2 percent of the U.S. market.

Android Is Everywhere

While the iPhone took the top spot again for devices, Android is still the king when it comes to mobile operating systems. Google owns 52 percent of the U.S. market with approximately 71.1 million subscribers, thanks to a variety of smartphone partners like Samsung, HTC and LG -- and its subsidiary Motorola -- making dozens of Android smartphones. But there may be cause for a little concern as Android's share of the mobile platform market fell 1.4 percent from the previous quarter.

Apple's iOS Is Gaining

Apple's iOS platform increased its share 2.7 percent to 39 percent of the overall subscriber market. That jump, coupled with Android's decline, is good news for Apple, which is still expanding its U.S. subscriber base even between major iPhone releases.

Microsoft Is Struggling

Despite a considerable amount of marketing muscle around it, Microsoft's Windows Phone is faring even worse than BlackBerry 10 in the OS rankings. The software giant saw a slight improvement of 0.1 percentage point to 3 percent of the overall market in the first quarter. Microsoft's alliance with Nokia doesn't seem to be paying off just yet.

Symbian Is Dead

Speaking of Nokia, the Finnish smartphone company's OS is all but dead. Nokia's Symbian platform, which was once the most widely used mobile OS in the world as recently as 2010, fell another 0.1 percentage points from the fourth quarter of 2012 and now holds just 0.5 percent of the overall U.S. smartphone market. When Nokia made the decision to embrace Windows Phone as its primary OS in 2011, it was the final nail in Symbian's coffin.