The US may have been overtaken recently by India as the second-largest smartphone market on the planet, but the country continues to remain as lucrative as ever for consumer electronics companies worldwide. The one reason for that is the popularity of high-end, premium flagships in the country, more so than anywhere else on the planet. That being the case, Apple continues to play a much more important role in the country’s smartphone market than it does anywhere else. However, the iPhone market share in the US has gone down below fifty percent in recent times, meaning, the country’s smartphone market is now aligned more closely to the rest of the world, with Android in the lead as the mobile platform of choice for mainstream consumers.
Now, market research and consulting company, Parks Associates, has come out with its report on the state of the US smartphone market for 2015. According to the study titled “360 View: Mobility and the App Economy”, 86 percent of all US households with broadband connections own at least one smartphone. As far as smartphone market share is concerned, the company says that Apple continues to remain the single largest smartphone vendor with around 40 percent of the overall market. Samsung and LG come in at numbers two and three with 31 percent and 10 percent of the market respectively, while Motorola and HTC round out the top five. According to Mr. Harry Wang, Health & Mobile Product Research at Parks Associates, “Apple remains the dominant smartphone manufacturer in the U.S., but Samsung is catching up”.
Another interesting find relates to the death of the contract system for mobile connections in the country. According to the report, with Verizon, AT&T and Sprint all following T-Mobile’s lead in doing away with multi-year contracts, almost half of all connections in the country – 49 percent to be precise – as of Q3, 2015 were free of any contractual obligations, resulting in customers in record numbers registering for early upgrade programs. The research also studied the practices of wireless subscribers in the country and found that over 70 percent stream online videos, over 40 percent use voice-recognition software like Google Now, Siri and Cortana, 36 percent use Wi-Fi calling and 26 percent use mobile payment apps.
