Apple Is The Top Smartphone Maker According To comScore Data

American Internet analytics company comScore has now released its latest U.S. smartphone market share data to report key trends in the industry. The information shows that 186.3 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones during the three months ending in February 2015, which indicates an increase of 5 percent since November 2014.

Apple and Samsung are leaders when it comes to hardware, but both have experienced a decrease in their market share between November 2014 and February 2015. Even so, Apple has retained its place as the top smartphone maker in the U.S. with 41.7 percent of the smartphone market, which is down 0.1 percentage points from November. Samsung came in second with 28.6 percent of the market, which shows a decrease of 1.1 percentage points from November. Although this loss is significant, Samsung’s latest smartphones, the Galaxy S6 and the S6 Edge have been receiving excellent reviews and may help the company to revive its market share in the near future. LG increased its share by 0.7 percentage points, and came in a distant third at 8.3 percent of the market. Motorola followed with 5.1 percent and HTC was fifth at 3.8 percent.

When it comes to the top smartphone platform, Android led the way in February with 52.8 percent of the market share. Apple was second at 41.7 percent, Microsoft was third at 3.5 percent, BlackBerry was fourth at 1.8 percent, and Symbian was fifth with 0.1 percent.

The report also includes data about the top 15 smartphone apps for users aged 18+ on both the iOS and Android platforms. Facebook came out on top, with its reach to 71.2 percent of the overall app audience, with YouTube coming in second at 56.4 percent, followed by Google Search at 52.2 percent and Google Play at 51.4 percent.

Marketing Land created the following chart to compare comScore’s top 15 apps data from February 2014 to February 2015, which is interesting to see. Several apps are new to the top 15 this year, including Amazon, Google+ and Snapchat. Additionally, some apps were on the top 15 in 2014 but are no longer there in 2015, including Yahoo Stocks, Yahoo Weather and the Weather Channel app.

Overall, it seems that Apple continues to be the most popular choice for hardware and Google is leading the way when it comes to software. It will be interesting to see if Samsung’s latest smartphones will prove to be successful enough to help the company increase its declining market share.