Nielsen: Smartphones Used By 50.4% Of U.S. Consumers, Android 48.5% Of Them
Nielsen today became the latest analyst house to call it for smartphones outnumbering more basic devices in the U.S. The company says that in March 2012 smartphones were in use by 50.4 percent of consumers in the country …
Context & Ripple Effects
The smartphone majority has been arriving in installments: Nielsen counted smartphones at just 28% of the U.S. cellphone market in November 2010, and by February 2011 it still described a three-way tie between Android, Apple and RIM. In late March 2012 it reported that smartphones accounted for half of all mobile phones and dominated new purchases, making today's 50.4% installed-base figure the confirmation of a crossover Nielsen itself had been telegraphing.
The more striking number is inside the majority: Android alone runs on 48.5% of U.S. consumer smartphones as of March 2012, which means Google now holds nearly half of an installed base that barely existed two years ago. The story drew same-day pickups from Computerworld, ZDNet, AllThingsD and 9to5Google, so the crossover is being read as a market-wide marker, not a Nielsen-only datapoint.
First-order effects
- RIM exits the picture Nielsen drew fourteen months ago — the February 2011 three-way tie with Android and Apple no longer describes a market where one OS controls roughly half of smartphone users.
- Feature-phone holdouts are now the minority of U.S. consumers, shifting carrier upgrade conversations and device lineups toward smartphones by default rather than as premium options.
Second-order effects
- App developers and advertisers can treat Android-plus-iOS reach as the default target audience for U.S. campaigns, squeezing platforms outside those two ecosystems out of mainstream budgets.
- Carriers face accelerating demand for the data plans and network capacity behind a mostly-smartphone base — consistent with the 89% jump in average smartphone data usage Nielsen reported in June 2011 — putting pressure on tiered pricing and spectrum plans.
Third-order effects
- If the installed base keeps consolidating around two operating systems, platform control — not handset hardware — becomes the structural battleground for the U.S. mobile economy, from distribution to advertising to payments.
- A smartphone-majority population makes mobile the primary screen for media behavior, extending the cross-platform patterns Nielsen was already measuring on tablets and game consoles in early 2012.
The trend: U.S. mobile is crossing from feature-phone norm to smartphone-majority market at record speed, with Android converting scale into de facto platform leadership while Apple holds the other pole and everyone else competes for the remainder.