14 DAY TRIAL // Figures provided by Apple for the first quarter of fiscal year 2016 show that iPhone sales stalled as compared to the same period of the previous year, but new statistics offered by Kantar for the largest markets around the world give us a different picture of iOS’ performance.
The United States, which was, is, and will continue to be Apple’s number one market, experienced a huge drop in iOS market share in the three-month period ending December 2015, with stats showing that 8.6 percent of the users decided to jump ship.
With Windows Phone and the other platforms also losing users, the most likely destination of all these users was Android, which actually managed to post an increase of 11.5 percentage points during the period.
Right now, Android is number one in the United States with 59.1 percent, followed by iOS with 39.1 percent. What’s more interesting is that, 12 months before, iOS was the leading mobile platform on the market in the United States with 47.7 percent while Android was the runner-up with 47.6 percent.
The same thing happened pretty much all over the world, with iOS losing market share in several large countries, such as the United Kingdom (-3.1%), France (-2.4%), Italy (-3.8%), and Australia (-5.5%).
Apple’s CEO claims otherwise
So what these stats are showing is that Android managed to overtake iOS in the last 12 months, as a significant number of users moved from Apple’s platform to Google’s.
And yet, that’s not what Apple’s CEO Tim Cook says. In the earnings call with investors this morning, Cook explained that he was blown away by the number of users who actually migrated from Android to iOS. His stats most likely come from the Move to iOS application that allows the transfer from Android to iOS seamlessly, but they are clearly completely opposite to the figures provided by Kantar.
Either way, it’s pretty clear that iOS is not doing very well right now, and Cook himself admitted that he expected a decline in iPhone sales in the next quarter, so Apple needs to urgently take action and find new ways to keep customers onboard. Otherwise, the 20 percent gap between Android and iOS could increase with every new month.
