Dec 18 2009
Smart Phone Market Share
Market share of products is important to keep track of so that software developers will know the most profitable area to focus building applications. comScore conducted a survey over several months to determine the number of people using smart phones. The survey was reserved for American mobile customers over the age of 13. They were asked what phone they owned and from this, the operating system was determined.
The results of the study are the following:
| February | May | July | October | |
| No proprietary OS | 206,825,938 | 203,920,230 | 200,981,682 | 196,773,054 |
| Apple | 5,258,504 | 5,744,018 | 6,630,298 | 8,970,049 |
| 427,914 | 797,633 | 894,159 | 1,020,364 | |
| Microsoft | 6,807,554 | 7,040,584 | 6,659,579 | 7,131,797 |
| Palm | 2,398,755 | 2,406,244 | 2,626,151 | 2,843,534 |
| RIM | 9,668,977 | 12,202,058 | 13,080,555 | 14,963,238 |
| Symbian | 888,532 | 889,232 | 1,042,052 | 1,297,965 |
Source: comScore
The numbers surprised me somewhat. From all of the hype around the iPhone, I thought that this would have been the been leading smart phone, but Blackberries still maintain a large lead over it. I was also surprised at the large market share that Microsoft has in spite of complaints over their lack of success in the smart phone arena. I prefer Windows Mobile myself, since its easy to develop for it using Visual Studio, but Microsoft needs to create an OS that resembles an iPhone if they want people to continue using it in the future.