Smartphone market share consolidates at top, study shows
Apple and Samsung continue to dominate smartphone makers, while Google's Android and iOS remain the top platform, according to ComScore, with the rest of the leaderboard ceding share to them.
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The smartphone market leaders are more entrenched, and that's bad news for the underlings, based on a new study from ComScore.
ComScore's latest MobiLens report had no shifts in status among the major phone manufacturers and mobile operating systems in the three months ended in May, but the top two in both fields gained share while the bottom three all lost ground.
Apple ranked as the top phone maker with 39.2 percent of U.S. smartphone subscribers, up 0.3 percentage point from the prior quarter, followed by Samsung with 23 percent market share, up 1.7 points.
But HTC , Motorola, and LG, which rounded out the top five, and all lost share.
As they have for more than two years, the top operating systems all held their rankings. Google's Android and Apple's iOS remained No. 1 and 2, respectively, with both rising. Blackberry, Microsoft and Symbian systems all declined.
Blackberry's rate of decline wasn't as sharp as it had been in previous ComScore reports, but that's little relief on a day the company's shares plunged 27 percent after a bleak quarterly report.
Overall, more and more Americans are choosing smartphones as their mobile option. In the latest three-month period, 141 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones, which is 59 percent mobile market penetration.
During the period of the latest study, the Blackberry Z10 launched a month before Samsung rolled out its Galaxy S4, and the HTC One also debuted.