Apple is the king of smartphone sales in the United States. That’s where it has headed for over a decade now, and you can chalk that up to the mostly brilliant marketing and synergy that permeates throughout iPhones and Apple’s branding. Research showed thatApple first took over Android with the number of iPhone users in the US back in 2022, but 2023 showed thatsmartphone sales dropped across the board. Perhaps a more important metric to read the pulse of smartphone buyers in the US is to see the percentage of users that switched from one operating system to another. In 2023, fewer new iPhone owners jumped ship to iOS from Android than in 2022.
Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, which is a top player in market research, isresponsible for the reportthat says 13% of people who bought an iPhone in 2023 switched to that iPhone from an Android phone (viaAndroid Authority). That is down from 15% in 2022, which represents the largest percentage over a five-year span (dating back to 2019’s 13% mark) of people who have switched from Android to Apple. Both in 2020 and 2021, only 11% of new iPhone users switched from Android, the lowest number across the data span.
This data does not show the raw numbers of people who switched from Android phones to iPhones, but the 2% drop is encouraging for fans of the Google-based OS and its Android partners in Samsung, OnePlus, and others. However, after a sharp 4% increase in people who swapped to iPhones from 2021 to 2022, directly following a 2% drop from 2019 to 2020, it means little for the future.Cell phones have changed a lot over the last 24 years, and they will continue to do so in big ways with theadvent of artificial intelligence.
The bigger issue that Android has to face head-on is the fact that it’s simply not cool for younger generations.Nearly 9 in 10 US teenagers use iPhones. When those teens grow into adults, there will be very little reason to switch from smartphone ecosystems they’ve indoctrinated themselves into. On a global scale, Android still dominates, but with the US being a high-spending major player in the world economy, that’s a bleak number. Fewer people switching from Android to iPhone than in previous years is nice, but if history shows us anything, that progress could all be for naught in a year.
