Android, Samsung maintain strong positions in U.S. smartphone market in April

June 4, 2014

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comScore has released their latest numbers for the U.S. smartphone market from April 2014 showing Samsung and Android continue to grow at the expense of almost everyone else. Samsung saw the number of smartphone subscribers owning one of their devices grow by a full percentage point since January 2014, up to 27.7% of the market. Of the top five manufacturers, Samsung was the only one to see growth during that period with both Apple and LG suffering the biggest losses of 0.2% and 0.4% respectively. Motorola and HTC also saw their market share slip slightly.

In terms of operating system platforms for smartphones, Android continued to maintain their position on top, improving from 51.7% to 52.5% of the market during the period of January to April 2014. Meanwhile, Apple lost 0.2% of the market and Blackberry continued their downward spiral losing another 0.6% of the market to only hold 2.5%. While it may be small, Redmond fans will be glad to know Microsoft was able to buck the trend of most platforms and managed to grow their market share by 0.1% to 3.3%.

comScore also released data on the top ranking smartphone apps. Facebook claimed the top spot landing on 74.1% of all smartphones. Google managed to land three apps in the top 5 including Google Play, YouTube and Google Search in positions two, three and four. The fifth place app was Pandora Radio. For social media platforms, Twitter and Instagram also managed to make it to the top 15 along with Facebook’s Messenger.

According to comScore’s data, 167.9 million people in the U.S. own smartphones as of April 2014, which they say makes market penetration right at 70%. This is up 5% or roughly 12 million new smartphone owners since January which seems like a significant change given the maturity of the U.S. market.