Android continues its steady climb to the top. Data from comScore measuring the mobile subscriber market between July and October shows that Android now takes 23.5% of the smartphone OS market, up two percentage points since September. The Android OS has climbed a full 6.5 percentage points compared to July, when it claimed just 17% of the market.
RIM continues to hold the top spot with 35.8% of the market, but Android is quickly chipping away at that lead. RIM’s market share is down 3.5 percentage points from July, when it accounted for 39.3% of the market.
Apple’s iOS has risen less than one percentage point to take 24.6% of the market, compared to its share in July of 23.8% of the market. Microsoft also saw a dip, dropping 2.1 percentage points to go home with 9.7% of the mobile OS market, compared to its July share of 11.8%.
As always, the rising star of Android is do, in part, to the fact that the smartphone market on the whole is growing. Two million became first-time smartphone owners (aw) in October, raising the number of people who own smartphones to 60.7 million, a 14% increase compared to July. Today, one out of every four mobile subscribers owns a smartphone. And data from Nielsen has shown that most first-time smartphone owners are getting Android devices.
As the smartphone market continues to grow, more people are engaging with smartphone features than ever before. Browser usage was up 2.6%, app downloading was up 2.3%, and accessing social networking sites or blogs was up 2.4%. Texting has also risen 2.1%.
Which device manufacturers are people turning to for their phones? Samsung continues to be the preferred manufacturer in the mobile market, with a market share of 24.2%, up 1.1 percentage points from July, when it claimed 23.1% of the market. Most other manufacturers have kept relatively level with where they were in July, with LG taking 21% of the market, RIM claiming 9.3% of the market, and Nokia taking 7.1%. Motorola saw the biggest loss, dropping 2.1 percentage points to 17.7%, compared to its July standing of 19.8%.
As of October, 234 million Americans aged 13 and older owned a mobile device.
Image source: androidauthority.com
