Apple has been getting heated competition in China, the world’s largest smartphone market. Recently, Chinese brands have been flying off the shelves, they offer features that rival and even beat those of the iPhone for a fraction of the price. We have seen brands such as Oppo make bold moves such as having better cameras in the front than on the back, others like Xiaomi has gone beyond normal phone designs to bring truly bezeless phones such as the Xiaomi Mi Mix, not forgetting Huawei’s very successful partnership with Leica to bring professional grade photography on smartphones.
This efforts have seen Android rise in dominance in China. Currently, the Goggle OS has an 86.4% market share in China, that’s a 8.9% gain compared to last year. On the other hand, Apple’s IOS enjoys only 13.2% of the market, a 9.3% drop since last year. In fact, this is the lowest percentage Apple has had in the last 3 years.
Crossing over to the USA, Apple’s home country, you would expect them to have an upper hand over Android but that isn’t the case. Apple’s iOS share stands at 42% while that of Android is at 55.9%. Well some may argue that the USA is also android’s home turf, sure it is, but most of the hardware manufacturers utilizing that OS comes from other countries.
These stats cover a 3 months period that ended in February 2017 as researched by Kantar. Now that the stunning Samsung Galaxy S8 and S8+ is out and already breaking sales records, it will be interesting to see how the market share tide shifts.