Benedict Evans on the Q3 U.S. Handset Market

Benedict Evans, examining the numbers from the big four U.S. carriers:

In other words, Android has over 75% of the global smartphone market, but just under 50% of the US market.

This is interesting:

The interesting analytical problem is that these figures are very different from those from surveys of the install base (by Comscore and others), which suggest that iPhone share is more like a third of US smartphones. Yet the iPhone has been at or around 50% of sales for almost 2 years. Either the surveys are wrong or the iPhone has a significantly higher replacement cycle - despite being on the same two-year contracts as Android. Puzzling.

I’ll bet it’s true that iPhone owners are more likely to upgrade every single year than Android owners, but not in large enough numbers to account for a discrepancy this large.

★ Monday, 12 November 2012