Android takes a bite out of Apple, new sales figures show

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It’s the largest, most valuable publicly traded company in the world, and they may make some of the most popular products but when it comes to the smartphone market, it looks like Apple is in a losing battle.

When the iPhone 4s came out, plenty of pundits figured the phone would outsell Androids. But when Nielsen went through all the sales data, they found that’s not the case — not by a long shot.

The research firm says that as of the second quarter of this year, 51.8 percent of smartphone owners in the US had a phone running on Google’s Android operating system while 34.3 percent were running on Apple’s iOS.

Of all the people who purchased a new smartphone in the second quarter, 54.6 percent opted for an Android-based model, while 36.3 percent went for an iPhone.

“This growth is driven by increasing smartphone purchases,” Nielsen says, adding that two out of three Americans who got a new cell phone in the last three months chose a smartphone.

Remarkably, approximately 90 percent of all smartphone purchases during Q2 were either for an iOS or Android device.

And, for the first time, Android devices now make up at least half of all smartphone sales in the UK, Germany, France, Italy, Spain and Australia.

Even though iPhone sales don’t rival Android sales, Nielsen says Apple has the largest slice of the pie among manufacturers. Apple holds 34 percent of the overall handset market, while Samsung comes in second with a 17 percent share, just ahead of HTC.

While Apple may play second fiddle to Android, it’s still doing a lot better than a certain Canadian company. Turns out the biggest loser in all of this is RIM. The makers of BlackBerry claim just 8.1 percent of the total smartphone market, but only four percent of buyers in the second quarter went for a BlackBerry.

Despite the efforts of RIM, Microsoft and others, the smartphone market has most definitely become a two-horse race and it doesn’t look like that will change any time soon. RIM announced last month that it won’t launch its new BlackBerry 10 platform until 2013 and though Microsoft plans to launch its new Windows Phone 8 operating system sometime this fall, it has yet to grab the hearts and minds (not to mention wallets) of consumers with its current offerings.

A new report also finds that the BlackBerry developer community is almost dead — which means that fewer cool new apps will be available for BlackBerry. According to a report by tech analyst firm, IDC, developers interested in creating apps for BlackBerry declined from 20.7 percent in Q4 of 2011 to 15.5 percent in Q1 of 2012. A Baird Equity Research report also found that last quarter, 31 percent of BlackBerry developers said they have shifted to other platforms. In Q1, that number was 34 percent.

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