Researches Show Apple’s iPhone User Loyalty And iPad Tablet Market Share On the Decline

The past few days haven’t been the best ones for Apple. The company failed to comply with a UK court ruling recently where Apple was told to apologize to Samsung for an official statement on its website. And now as per various reports, it looks like Google’s Android is slowly and steadily eroding Apple’s popularity in the smartphone and tablet markets. 

Android managed to grab 75% of market share compared to just 14.9% for iOS in the third quarter of 2012 as per IDC. According to Strategy Analytics research, for the first time since the launch of iPhone, there is a decline in loyal owners in the US with 88 percent of current iPhone owners planning to buy another Apple smartphone, representing a decrease of 93 percent last year. While in Western Europe, 75 percent iPhone owners are likely to buy a new iPhone. which is a 13 percent decline compared to 88% percent in 2011. The firm blames the negative press for the decrease in consumer interest for iPhones.

According to Paul Brown, director at Strategy Analytic’s User Experience Practice,

“There is no doubt that Apple is continuing its success in retaining existing user base while attracting new customers”.”However, negative press prompted by a perceived lack of recent innovation by Apple has meant we are starting to see some growth in the number of previously highly loyal consumers who are now reconsidering whether or not they will purchase a new iPhone for their next device.”

Similarly, according to IDC, Apple’s tablet market share dropped to 50.4% in tablet market while Samsung and Amazon grabbed 18.4% and 9.0% of the market share respectively in the third quarter of 2012. Samsung was able to ship 5.1 million tablets in the third quarter of 2012, gaining 11.9 percentage points year-over-year while Amazon gained 4.2 percentage points from the second quarter of 2012 with its 7-inch and 8.9-inch Kindle Fire HD tablets. Asus hit the top 5 chart gaining 4.8 percentage points year-over-year, thanks to Nexus 7.

Though Apple still owns half of the tablet market share but Android tablets are slowly cutting into its share with more Android tablets from various manufacturers making appearances. Google and Samsung’s new Nexus 10 tablet is expected to contribute to this trend.