Apple continued its dominance in smartphone sales in the U.S., according to July 2 reports that gauged quarterly smartphone metrics, while Android's reign in the realm of mobile operating systems held strong over the same period.
While not quite in sync with the U.S.' fiscal quarters, two of ComScore's latest reports, MobileLens and Mobile Metrix, detailed the state of the smartphone market over a three month period ending on May 14 and shows little has changed since the previous report, for the period ending on February 14, was released.
ComScore reported that the number of users of Apple's handsets increased by .06 percent from the previous quarter, moving from 41.3 percent of the smartphone market share at the end of the February 14 quarter and up to 41.9 by May 14.
Samsung, Apple's closest competitor in terms of smartphone sales, reportedly moved up by 0.8 percent to 27.8 percent over the same six month period. Motorola and LG and HTC each battled for their stakes of under seven percent of the smartphone market share.
Over ComScore's quarters that ended on February 14 and May 14, Google's Android OS, at 52.1 percent of the mobile OS market share, maintained a solid lead over Apple's iOS 41.9 percent hold on the market. While the Android OS ended both quarters with 52.1 percent of the market share in hand, iOS climbed up from 41.3 percent to 41.9 percent.
iOS' 0.6 percent increase was likely sourced somewhere from the bottom of the mobile OS hierarchy, as ComScore reported the Blackberry OS lost 0.6 percent of the mobile OS market share and Symbian losing 0.1 percent of its share over the same six-month period in which iOS gained new subscribers.
The top five apps, in terms of reach and device penetration, revealed in ComScore's May 14 report were Facebook, with a 74.6 percent; Google Play at 51.8 percent; YouTube at 51.7 percent; Google Search at 49.2 percent; and Pandora Radio at 47.6 percent - the Spotify app didn't make it into the top 15 of ComScore's report. The data to determine the reach of the top 15 mobile apps was collected form subscribers 18 years of age or older.
Overall, the market for smartphones continued to grow over the six-month period measured by ComScore. The analytics organization reported on July 2 that the smartphone market can swelled to approximately 169 million users in the U.S., growing by four percent between the quarters ending on February 14 and May 14.
ComScore derives smartphone and mobile OS metrics from users 13 years of age or older. The metrics in their MobileLens survey only take into account a user's primary device.
