Android Growth Continues, Others Lose ShareAndroid Growth Continues, Others Lose Share

Android is showing no signs of slowing down. For the three months ended July 31, Android is the only smartphone platform to show growth. Palm remained flat, while Apple, Microsoft and RIM all saw declines.ComScore's latest report covers May, June and July of 2010. During this time Apple launched the iPhone 4 and even though it was a massive sales success, being a single phone on a single carrier in the US is limiting its growth. Many of the fourth generation's sales are from existing iPhone owners that are upgrading. That generates revenue for Apple, but does nothing for the iPhone market share.

The fifth generation iPhone could come with a genie that pops out when you rub it and grant you three wishes and there are still people that won't switch to AT&T's network. Apple has dropped from 25.1 percent share to 23.8 percent share. Because the smartphone market is growing, it shows that whatever growth the iPhone is enjoying, it isn't keeping up with the market overall.

Google's Android platform has surpassed Windows Mobile from Microsoft. This isn't new information, but it is the first time this has happened over a rolling three month period, which shows that the trend is real. Microsoft's share for the three months ended April was 14 percent, just ahead of Google's 12 percent. Now the tables have turned. Microsoft is at 11.8 percent while Google has climbed to 17 percent.

RIM of course remains firmly at the top. with 39.3 percent share, but it has been steadily declining. No data from the new Torch running Blackberry 6.0 is reflected in this study.

Some of you may be recalling recent news that Android was much higher in the rankings. Such surveys are usually based on NPD data which only looks at retail sales. ComScore's data appears to include corporate and wholesale channels.

Surprisingly, Palm's WebOS has remained flat, even though its OS is getting a bit long in the tooth by smartphone standards. It is a year old and made a relatively small splash in the market when it launched exclusively on Sprint's network. Branching out to AT&T and Verizon has obviously helped it remain steady.

Reports in the next six months will have a lot of fresh faces on it. WebOS 2.0 will be launched, as well as Windows Phone 7, which is Microsoft's complete reboot of its mobile platform and Blackberry 6.0 will be included in the data.

For the next few months though, does anyone really expect the trends to be any different than they are right now?