iPhone remains the market leader by a whisper
The iPhone is by far the best-selling smartphone handset, and it is still ahead in the smartphone operating system competition as well, according to the latest figures in the smartphone sales war.
Apple’s iOS4 still holds a lead over both RIM’s Blackberry lineup and the hundred or so Android phones in the marketplace, but all of those Android phones are beginning to close in on the single handset that runs iOS4. The iPhone, when you start counting handsets, is still outselling all other individual handsets by a wide margin, regardless of maker or operating system. Counting by operating system and not by handsets, Apple holds 28.6 percent of the U.S. smartphone marketplace, with RIM at 26.1 percent and Android at 25.8 percent, barely lower than Blackberry, according to a Gigiom story.
It is very likely that the next report out will show RIM and the Blackberry line in third place behind Apple and Android. The fall from smartphone dominance in the U.S. has been slow but inexorable for RIM, who was once the undisputed leader of the market. The 100-plus Android powered phone models from a dozen or so manufacturers are gaining fast, though no individual Android make or model really stands out from the rest. The situation has been compared to the one with Windows many years ago when all the IBM PC clones began to run the Microsoft operating system.
It is not unlikely that the Android operating system will surpass iOS4 during the coming months, but there are dark shadows catching up with the Google smartphone operating system as well. The most serious, perhaps, is versionitis. There are too many versions of Android out in the wild that have been altered by too many manufacturers and that is starting to cause problems for developers. Google does not seem to have any inclination to control its OS in the field. Nor is anyone doing much about malware, which is becoming as much of a problem for Android as it is for Windows.
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