Apple's iOS cuts gap with Android in latest comScore data

According to the latest stats from analytical firm comScore, Apple is slowly cutting the gap between itself and Android in the U.S. For the three months ended in December, iOS saw its market share of the U.S. smartphone platform market rise 2% to 36.3% from 34.3% for the three months ended in September, while Android's rose over the same time from 52.5% to 53.4% That allowed iOS to cut into Android's lead by 1.1 percentage points to 17.1 percentage points.  BlackBerry dropped the 2 percentage points that Apple gained, but still finished third with a 6.4% share of the U.S.market for the three month ended December. Microsoft also took a substantial beating in the three months, slipping .7 % to close out the year with a 2.9% slice of the U.S. pie. And Symbian had no change as its market share remained at .6% in the states.

A look at the share of the U.S. market owned by smartphone manufacturers found that Apple added 2% to its market share. The Cupertino based firm now has 36.3% of the market for the three months ended December. While that tops the 21% of the stateside market that is controlled by Samsung, the Korean manufacturer added 2.3% from the three months added in September which means Sammy sliced .3 percentage points off of Apple's lead. Even though HTC had a rough three month period, losing 1.8%, the 10.1% market share it still owned in the U.S.by year end, allowed it to remain in third place. Motorola picked up some ground on HTC despite losing .7% to 9.1%. And while LG did gain half a percentage point in market share for the three months ended in December, the Korean electronics giant closed out 2012 by owning just 7.1% of the smartphone market in the U.S.

If you haven't yet caught on, since iOS is Apple and Apple is iOS, the numbers for the iOS marketshare in the U.S. platform market equal Apple's marketshare in the smartphone manufacturer's market. But Apple is singularly unique in this regard. Samsung, for example, might sell a lot of Android phones, but because not all Android phones are made by Samsung, the stats don't equal out like they do for Apple.

source: comScore viaSlashGear