Data came out this morning from Nielsen providing insight to the current smart phone operating system market share in the US. There are several observations about this report that I want to make.
First off, although this is a report highlighting the state of smart phone operating system market share it demonstrates that Apple is the leading manufacturer of smart phones. Android has 39% smart phone operating system market share however the key point is that is spread out across multiple device manufactures.
What’s amazing to me is that Apple has accomplished 28% iOS smart phone market share with only one single new product each year. They haven’t needed a dozen or more devices on the market at any given time to garner such a large footprint in the market place. They have only needed one called the iPhone.
Second, I am pleased for HTC collecting 20% of the handset market between their mix of Android and Windows Phone. HTC is being rewarded in the market place for their own innovations with things like Sense and other custom applications. These things were created intentionally to differentiate them from other vendors using the same OS and it is working.
Lastly RIM has dropped to 20%. It seems like just yesterday that most of my market share analysis was pointing out that RIM was leading the pack with OS market share and smart phone handset shipments. How quickly things change in this industry.
One last-last point. I also like how Nielsen choose to visualize this data. Rather than a pie chart they broke it out in what they like to call a “brownie pan.” I actually think looking at data represented this way is more helpful than a pie chart.