T-Mobile’s introduction of the iPhone may have boosted Apple in in
its U.S. race against Google’s Android mobile operating system,
according to a new sales report from analysis firm Kantar Worldpanel.
The firm said Monday that the long-awaited addition of the
iPhone to T-Mobile’s lineup gave Apple a 3.5 percent bump in the horse
race, though it still only holds 41.9 percent of the U.S. market as
compared to Android’s 51 percent. The figures are the result of over
240,000 interviews the firm conducted over a three-month period ending
in May.
Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform picked up the third-place spot in
the survey, with 4.6 percent of sales, about 0.9 percent more than the
share Kantar determined that it had in the same period last year.
T-Mobile only added the iPhone 5 to its device lineup in April, six years after Apple introduced that smartphone.
While
availability on the T-Mobile network gained Apple some ground, it
didn’t appear to impact T-Mobile nearly as much. The company is still
the fourth-largest carrier in the country with 10.1 percent of
smartphone sales — a drop of 3.4 percent from the same period last year,
the firm said.
The firm said that T-Mobile may, however, tick up in the next report when it has a full quarter of iPhone sales under its belt.
Not
only did Kantar find that T-Mobile, as a carrier, seems to be best at
attracting first-time smartphone buyers, it also found that 28 percent
of all its subscribers who plan to upgrade their phone in the coming
year expect to pick up an iPhone.
