Consumer Electronics

Apple iOS Snagged 42% of US Market During Holiday Season

Paul Ausick

Published: March 15, 2017 1:30 pm

Last Updated: January 12, 2020 1:56 pm

Apple Inc. (NASDAQ: AAPL) had an excellent 2016 holiday season, thank you very much. In the three-month period from November 2016 through January 2017, Apple’s iOS-powered smartphones accounted for 42% of all U.S. sales, a year-over-year gain of 2.9%.

The Android operating system from Google/Alphabet Inc. (NASDAQ: GOOGL) captured 56.4% of the U.S. smartphone market to maintain its lead over Apple, but Android’s share dropped 1.8% year over year.

The data were reported Wednesday by Kantar Worldpanel and showed that Apple posted gains in many regions of the globe, not including, however, urban China or Japan.

Android captured 74.3% of the European Union’s five big markets — the United Kingdom, Germany, France, Italy and Spain — compared with 22.7% for Apple’s iOS. The iPhone remains the top-seller in Britain, Germany and France.

In urban China, Android accounted for 83.2% of all smartphone sales, a gain of 9.3 percentage points. Chinese maker Huawei accounted for 26.6% of all smartphones sold in urban China during the three-month period, with Apple nabbing 16.6% and Xiaomi accounting for 14.5%.

Kantar Worldpanel global consumer insight director Lauren Guenveur also commented on the recent Mobile World Congress 2017 show in Barcelona:

February’s Mobile World Congress 2017 demonstrated the true state of the market, with re-emerging brand names Nokia and Blackberry capturing a lot of attention, but now operating on Android rather than on their own legacy operating systems.

Even the new Nokia 3310 feature phone gets a mention, but no one really expects that to make a big dent in sales of Android and iOS devices. As Guenveur pointed out:

Seventy percent of the US domestic market is dominated by Apple and Samsung, and the third largest manufacturer, LG, accounted for an additional 11.1% of sales in the three months ending January 2017.