The mobile market isn’t exactly thriving with competition. In reality, it’s dominated by Apple and Google as iOS and Android continue to butt heads over marketshare. Other competitors, like Microsoft and RIM, can only hope to grab a few morsels that come their way. That trend doesn’t show any signs of stopping.
ComScore has just released its smartphone platform market share numbers for November 2012, and the results are not surprising in the least. Once again, Android is in the top spot with 53.7 percent of all smartphones in the U.S. sporting Google’s mobile OS. Apple came in a respectable second with 35 percent. Both platforms saw a small amount of growth from August 2012 with Android growing 1.1 percent and iOS growing 0.7 percent.
Everybody else did not come out of November looking too good. RIM came in a distant third with only 7.3 percent of the U.S. market while Microsoft trailed behind with only 3 percent. Symbian continues its death struggle against certain oblivion with only 0.5 percent. In even worse news, all three saw decreases since August 2012 with RIM’s marketshare decreasing by 1 percent, Microsoft’s decreased by 0.6 percent and Symbian’s decreased by 0.2 percent.
As for the mobile device manufacturers, Samsung is still on top. In November, 26.9 percent of all smartphones on the market were made by Samsung. Apple came in second with 26.9 percent of the market. LG, Motorola and HTC came in third, fourth and fifth respectively.
Just like with mobile OS platforms, only the two leaders saw an increase in marketshare. Samsung’s marketshare increased by 1.2 percent since August and Apple’s increased by 1.4 percent in the same time period. The others all had their marketshare decrease by less than a percentage point.
It should be noted that these numbers are from November of last year. It doesn’t take into account all the new mobile devices that were activated over Christmas and the rest of the December. Windows Phone 8 also launched at the tail end of November so Microsoft’s marketshare may have climbed slightly in December. We won’t know for sure until comScore’s numbers for December come out.