When it comes to statistics, it seems that you can find anyone to back whatever opinion you might have. Just yesterday, Android was named the number one smartphone platform worldwide…when you look at shipments. Today, however, we’ve come across a stat that is equally good and bad for everyone involved, because everyone is the same.
According to Nielsen, “the competition between smartphone operating systems is a heated one” with a three-way tie between Blackberry, Android and iOS.
“When it comes to the installed base, that is, U.S. mobile consumers who already own smartphones, it is a three-way tie between Blackberry RIM, the smartphone pioneer, Apple’s IOS, which revolutionized the smartphone and popularized mobile apps, and Android OS, the operating system created by Google which has been taking the market by storm,” writes the company on its blog. Take a look at the graph for the three mobile platforms:
Of course, what the company doesn’t note is the obvious trajectories for these three companies. Blackberry is on a continual downslope, Android is on a upslope, while Apple has been hovering in a sine wave fashion around the 30% mark for the past two years.
As it notes, however, “Analyzing the preferences of those who purchased a smartphone in the past six months paints a different picture.”
Here, the image almost looks identical, but with each platform continuing its curve. Android takes the lead among new smartphone owners with 43%, Apple hangs around with 26% and Blackberry rounds up the pack with 20%.
What do you think? Will the second image soon stand in place for the first when it comes to mobile OS adoption?
