Commentary

Kantar: iOS Outpacing Android, Windows Phones Start To Budge From Behind

Window-phoneThe market share horse race among smartphone providers has many dimensions -- not only raw sales but also rate of usage across platforms and relative monetization levels. Google won the sheer tonnage battle a while ago with a majority of smartphone owners in the U.S., even if they don’t all use the things with the same intensity as the typical iOS user. But Android may be showing some preliminary signs of weakness in the latest data from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech.

Through the first quarter of 2013 in the U.S., Android owned 51.7% of the market -- up 1.4 points year-over-year. But iOS smartphones were up 2.3 percentage points to 41.4%. iOS phone growth is outpacing Android, if only incrementally.

But dark horse Microsoft and its Windows Phone OS has maintained a 5.6% share of the market -- the same since last quarter, but up 1.8 percentage points from last year. To borrow a phrase from politics, it is Windows internal numbers that are most interesting.

Kantar finds that Windows phones are capturing a number of newcomers to the smartphone world, with 42% of their buyers upgrading from feature phones, 25% from another Windows device and 23% from Android. In comparison, only 31% of iOS buyers are coming from feature phones.

While the numbers are small for Windows, it still shows that there is room for a third OS to better address the final segments of smartphone expansion, and that Android may have a soft underbelly.

It also shows that users are not as slavishly devoted to the standards and conventional wisdom established by the early adopters. For those of use in the mobile world for some time, it may have seemed for a while that the OS contest was “game over” with two clear victors that were likely to divide the market for the foreseeable future. But for people outside of the bubble, compatibility with a zillion apps -- let alone with the expectations of gizmo geeks -- is less relevant than their phones doing a handful of things very well.

It is not surprising that Kantar finds that Windows in the last year has been gaining share among 24- to-34-year-olds. Hmm. Maybe both Apple and Samsung are wrong about what constitutes the cool youth phone.

Personally, in my limited use of the Windows Phone 8 OS on a mid-level Lumia model I can see how the phone sells its strengths. Its ability to surface live content to the top level (social media posts, email, messages, news) is a genuine step forward beyond the icon-based approach. Whatever the fate of Windows Phone 8, I am sure this key element will inform subsequent iterations of both Android and iOS.

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