Android Most Popular Operating System in U.S. Among Recent Smartphone Buyers
According to August data from The Nielsen Company, Android is now the most popular operating system among people who bought a smartphone in the past six months, while Blackberry RIM and Apple iOS …
Context & Ripple Effects
Nielsen's August survey lands two months after Gartner reported that Android had already claimed the top spot in U.S. smartphone operating system sales in its worldwide mobile device tally, so this is the second major measurement firm in as many months confirming the same handoff. What Nielsen adds is the buyer-level cut: among people who purchased a phone in the past six months, Android now leads both BlackBerry RIM and Apple iOS.
The corroboration runs beyond handset counts — Quantcast's August figures put Android at 25% of U.S. mobile web browsing against iOS, and a September relationship note already flagged major players shifting toward Android. The counterweight worth holding alongside the momentum story: a June study found roughly 20 percent of 48,000 apps in the Android Marketplace allowed third parties access to sensitive information.
First-order effects
- BlackBerry RIM loses its historical grip on new U.S. smartphone buyers, while Apple iOS competes for the same recent-purchase pool with a single-vendor lineup against Android's multi-manufacturer distribution.
- Nielsen's recent-buyer metric becomes the scoreboard carriers and manufacturers watch, since purchase-intent share today predicts installed-base share several quarters out.
Second-order effects
- Developer attention and marketing spend follow the recent-buyer curve toward Android, raising pressure on RIM and Apple to answer at the carrier shelf rather than in spec sheets.
- As Android's app base grows faster, the Marketplace's security posture — that June finding on third-party access to private data — turns into a competitive liability rivals can press and enterprise buyers will scrutinize.
Third-order effects
- If recent-buyer momentum compounds, the U.S. market structurally reorganizes around an open, multi-vendor operating system versus an integrated hardware-software incumbent, with RIM squeezed between the two models.
- Measurement firms like Nielsen, Gartner, and Quantcast become de facto arbiters of the platform war, since each cuts the market differently — sales, usage, browsing — and each cut tells a different leader's story.
The trend: U.S. smartphone share is consolidating around a multi-vendor open operating system whose lead shows up first among recent buyers before it reaches the installed base.