This holiday, Apple beat Samsung but Android trounced iOS
Looking at the numbers.
It's an annual tradition in the tech news space that, after a shop-heavy holiday like Black Friday or Christmas, mobile analytics companies regale us with layman's explanations for the data they accrued.
One such company is Yahoo-owned Flurry, which posted this week about how, as usual, "Holiday Shoppers Invest in Apple." By its count, taken from deals with app developers across iOS and Android, Apple's iPhone achieved 44% of the total device activations this year, followed by Samsung at 21%, and Huawei and LG following at a scant 3% and 2%, respectively.
The data is meant to show that Apple dominated the U.S. smartphone market this holiday, as it has done every year for the past half-decade. Samsung did inch up 1% compared to 2015, and Huawei went from practically nothing to third place, but the story is, of course, spun to make it look like the iPhone won Christmas. And perhaps it did in a way, since more iPhones were activated than Galaxy devices, and for many people Samsung's Galaxy line is Android. But 44% of the activations leave, well, more than half unaccounted for, and you can bet your bottom dollar that after Samsung's 21% and the 13% that comprise Huawei, LG, Amazon, Oppo, Xiaomi and Motorola, there are a a bunch of trailing one percents, and they all have the word Android attached somewhere.
While Flurry's numbers were comprised of app and device activations from the U.S. and beyond, it's interesting to see how it mirrors existing U.S. smartphone market share: typically, Apple controls around 44% of the U.S. smartphone market, while Samsung, owns around 28%. That number is very different in most parts of Europe and Asia, where Android share numbers in the 80-90% range.
The number of activations for the Korean giant were presumably down because it lacked a fall flagship, but it's unclear how many people went with an iPhone instead or decided to go with, as the chart shows, a Huawei, LG, Xiaomi or Oppo device. If anything, it shows the growing importance of the Chinese market in worldwide smartphone activations, since three of those four companies have a near-zero presence in the U.S.
Flurry's numbers go on to say that the Pixel, Google's flagships, were largely left out of the conversation this fall, despite what we believe are respectable numbers from Verizon and, to a lesser extent, the Google Store. But Google has had tremendous trouble filling demand for the Pixels, which were out of stock for much of November and early December, and the launch has been very U.S.-heavy, which also could have contributed to the lack of worldwide market penetration.
All this is to say that numbers can be interpreted in a bunch of ways, but the one major takeaway is that the Note 7's absence clearly hurt Samsung very much.
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