Samsung rules mobile manufacturing, Android owns OS

Looking at all mobile subscriber data, not just smartphones, comScore finds a disrupting industry

Mobile is exploding. We don’t have to know that one in four toddlers have used a smartphone to realize that. But who is winning the most market share in this burgeoning mobile environment?

Surveying more than 30,000 U.S. mobile subscribers in June, comScore found the leaders in mobile: on the manufacturing side, it's Samsung, and on the platform side, it's Android.

The leading OEMs are Samsung and LG with 25.3 percent and 21.3 percent shares of the market, respectively, with both numbers representing a few decimal points of growth versus March. Filling out the rest of the top five for total mobile subscribers in the U.S. are Motorola (14.5 percent share, down 1.3 percent), Apple (8.9 percent share, up 1.0 percent) and RIM (7.9 percent share, down 0.5 percent).

Still dominating on the platform side is Google’s Android, with 40.1 percent of the market, a 5.4 point boost since March. None of that is at the expense of Apple iOS, however, which also saw an increase (of 1.1 percent) to 26.6 percent.

Left in the dust by the two top trailblazers, the rest of the top five all experienced losses in market share: RIM BlackBerry (23.4 percent, down 3.7 percent), Microsoft (5.8 percent, down 1.7 percent) and Symbian (2.0 percent, down 0.3 percent).

RIM is the biggest loser in regards to both manufacturing and platform, which makes sense since the two are intrinsically tied (as with Apple and the iPhone). Following disappointing Q1 earnings, and with nary a bright future ahead, the company announced at the end of July that it would be slimming down the company at the expense of 2,000 employees.

Though comScore’s data falls pretty much in line with what Nielsen gave us a week ago, in regard to smartphone platform market share, there are differences on the OEM side because comScore looked beyond smartphones. According to Nielsen’s data, the largest manufacturers are Apple and RIM, followed by HTC, Motorola and Samsung.