comScore releases U.S. smartphone subscriber market share for March 2015

comScore today released a new U.S. smartphone manufacturer and platform market share report for the three month period ending in March. The data suggests that while the continued strength of iPhone 6 adoption has resulted in market share gains for Apple, Android is still the most popular smartphone platform in the United States.

During the measured period, comScore reports that 187.5 million people in the United States owned smartphones, which equates to 77 percent of the total population. Of that, Apple was the most popular OEM (original equipment manufacturer) with 42.6 percent of U.S. smartphone subscribers (up 1% from December), followed by Samsung with 28.3 percent market share (down 1% from December), and LG taking third place with 8.4 percent (up 0.4% from December).

Apple may sell the most smartphones of any individual OEM, but the picture is a little different when looking at U.S. market share of the software powering the most smartphones. Here, Android was still the reigning king as of March with a market share of 52.4 percent, followed by Apple with 42.6 percent, and Microsoft in third place with 3.3 percent.

Finally, comScore’s MobiLens ranked the top 15 smartphone apps by usage as of the end of March using an “intelligent online survey of a nationally representative sample of mobile subscribers age 13 and older.” Fortunately for Google, their own apps represented six of the total fifteen, with YouTube coming in as the second most frequently used app after Facebook (or perhaps, not so fortunately with Facebook now entering video aggressively). This would suggest that Google has managed to attract a lot of eyeballs and attention across both Android and iOS, which is important with their main cash cow rapidly moving to mobile.