Much like the comScore top 50 internet sites report or its search market share reports, which rarely change much, the firm’s US smartphone report has similarly become flat with little changing from month to month. The new numbers are now out for February.
The top two OEM spots are consistently Apple and Samsung. On the OS side, Apple and Google gain or lose a point or fraction of a point and generally everyone else is flat or down. This month is really no exception except that LG has gained a bit of share among handset OEMs and Microsoft/Windows saw a modest gain on the platform side.
Samsung, in the chart above, probably took share directly from HTC, which recently introduced what many believe to be the best Android phone on the market today: HTC One (M8). However HTC doesn’t have the marketing muscle or budget of Samsung and has lost out to the Korean giant, which has built a formidable brand around Galaxy.
In the operating system share graphic above Microsoft showed the largest gain of 0.3 from November to February, indicating some modest traction in the US. Virtual assistant Cortana and Windows 8.1 may help boost the OS further in the coming months.
ComScore says that 163 million people in the US now own smartphones or 68.2 percent of the entire mobile phone population. Based on these numbers (and Nielsen figures) it’s quite possible that the smartphone number will be very close to 75 percent by the end of 2014 — and over 70 percent easily.
Finally comScore offers its top apps and top mobile web sites list. Compared with last month a couple of sites switched places on the mobile web site. Among them Facebook and Yahoo; Yahoo is now number two in mobile reach after Google. AOL and Apple also traded positions.
On the app side, there was modest movement up or down but the list is the same as last month. Below is the chart for July 2013, the first month comScore started producing mobile site and app rankings for the US market.
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