For the three months ending in December, Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) grew its share of the U.S. smartphone market by 1.2% compared with the three month period ending in September, from 40.6% to 41.8%. At the same time, Samsung Electronics grew its share of the smartphone market by an identical 1.2%, from 24.9% to 26.1%. Over two-thirds of all smartphone sales in the U.S. are made by these two companies.

The data comes from the latest report on the U.S. smartphone market from comScore Inc. (NASDAQ: SCOR).

On the operating system (platform) front, Apple gained 1.2% share in the three-month period to post a total of 41.8% of the platform market. Google Inc.’s (NASDAQ: GOOG) lost 0.3% share during the period, but continues to hold over half the platform market, with a 51.5% share. BlackBerry Ltd. (NASDAQ: BBRY) dropped 0.4% to post a 3.4% share, while Microsoft Corp. (NASDAQ: MSFT) lost 0.2% to post a 3.1% share.

The mobile sites with the greatest reach belong to Google (88.3% total reach), followed by Facebook Inc. (NASDAQ: FB). Facebook’s mobile app reaches 77.4% of all smartphone users and its Instagram app has a reach of 26.8%. Of the top ten smartphone apps measured by reach, Google holds five spots.

Now that Google has made a deal to sell its Motorola handset business to Lenovo and BlackBerry has outsourced its handset business to Foxconn, it will be interesting to see whether the new entrants can build share where the former entrants struggled. These hardware and platform numbers will get more interesting to watch in months ahead.

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