14 DAY TRIAL // They say Windows Phone failed to become a strong rival to Android and iOS, pointing to the 3 percent market share the platform currently holds worldwide as living proof.
Others believe Windows Phone has no future in Microsoft's vision and hint at the recent cost-cutting measures that the company announced as confirmation of this thing.
But data provided by Kantar claims otherwise. Instead of the collapse that everyone predicts, statistics offered this morning by Kantar for the top smartphone markets reveal that Windows Phone is not only maintaining its market share in most of the key countries but it's also improving it in some of them.
Take Germany, for example. In the three-month period ending June 2015, Windows Phone posted a market share of 10.5 percent, up 4.1 percent from the same period the year before. On the other hand, Android, which continues to be the leader in Germany, dropped 6.2 percentage points to 75.1 percent.
Europe still WP's top market
And yet, these statistics clearly show that Europe continues to be Windows Phone's top market, as compared to the United States, where it's still lagging behind its rivals.
In the United Kingdom, Windows Phone powers 11.3 percent of the smartphones, up 0.6 percent, while in Italy it achieved 14.2 percent, an increase of 4.1 percent. On the other hand, it lost some points in France, where it dropped 1.9 points to 8.7 percent, and in Spain, down 4.5 points to 3.0 percent.
In the United States, Android is number one with a share of 66.1 percent, an increase of 3.4 percent as compared to the same period in 2014, while iOS lost 2.3 percent of its users to eventually settle at 30.5 percent. Windows Phone is far behind with 3.0 percent, up 1.1 percent.
Microsoft hopes to do better in the next 12 months, especially because Windows 10 Mobile is just around the corner, but competing against Android and iOS will still be mission impossible in the short term.