In the mobile industry, there are several things going on right now. Samsung is believed to be growing at a tremendous pace. The company has become the top Android manufacturer, taking the crown from HTC, who has started to struggle mightily, even though it’s launching devices with incredible specs. Finally, Apple is supposedly in the midst of a collapse. Its stock price has dropped dramatically over the past few months, and most of the blame is going on Tim Cook or, more often, the lack of a Steve Jobs. As it does every month, comScore on Thursday released its data for the top smartphone manufacturers and operating systems for a three month period ending in February. The data confirms some of the thoughts on the mobile industry, while it disproves the others.
First off, let’s look at the top smartphone OEMs. Apple kept its crown as the number one individual phone manufacturer. Its share of the market increased from 35 percent to 38.9 percent. Samsung was the only other manufacturer to see an increase in market share, rising 1 percent from 20.3 percent to 21.3 percent. HTC fell from 11 percent to 9.3 percent, while Motorola decreased from 9.5 percent to 8.4 percent. Finally, LG saw a minimal fall from 7 percent to 6.8 percent.
As far as operating systems go, the data is not good for Google. comScore claims that the company’s market share fell 2 percent from 53.7 percent to 51.7 percent, but on the brighter side, it still holds a solid lead of its competitors. Apple was the only operating system to see a substantial increase, rising 3.9 percent, as we mentioned earlier. Microsoft’s operating system share increased from 3 percent to 3.2 percent, while Symbian remained the same and BlackBerry fell from 7.3 percent to 5.4 percent.
What can week make of this data? Well, it seems clear that Apple is not in horrible trouble like many seem to think and is still a very big competitor to both Samsung and Google. As we’ve pointed out before though, Apple has to innovate if it wants to keep its lead as the top manufacturer and keep increasing its operating system market share. It’s hard to know what caused Google’s fall in market share. This data does reflect the holiday season, and as we already knew, Apple had a very solid holiday quarter. In reality though, I don’t think Google has anything to worry about, while Apple does.
What do you think? Should Google worry? Let us know down in the comments!