Samsung and Google dominate the U.S. markets in mobile phones and smartphone operating systems, respectively, according to new data from the analytics company comScore.
Samsung products accounted for more than a quarter of all U.S. handset sales in the three-month period that ended May 31. LG products accounted for nearly 20 percent, but the company’s market share fell off slightly since the three-month period that ended in February.
Apple sold 15 percent of phones and showed the strongest growth in market share, with a change of 1.5 percent.
Google’s Android OS now runs on more than half the smartphones in the U.S. Apple’s iOS now runs on nearly a third of smartphones, but the company’s share of the OS pie grew more than twice as fast as Google’s.
Research In Motion, which recently posted dismal second-quarter financial results, lost 2 percent of its market share in the period. Its market share fell off more than the decline in usage of Symbian-based devices, even though Nokia is moving off the Symbian OS to Windows.
In terms of user behavior, game playing and music listening grew faster than the use of apps and browsers. Three-quarters of mobile users texted at least once, a rate that is unchanged since the last three-month period.
The rise in music listening seems to favor Apple and, to a lesser extent Google, according to Chris Silva, a mobile analyst at Altimeter Group.
Silva noted that Google’s emphasis at last week’s I/O conference on media content, including boosting video content in the Google Play store and unveiling a new media-streaming device, demonstrates that the company is “not content to let their media assets stagnate.”
The trend “should be troubling to brands like Microsoft that don’t have as strong an ecosystem for music and movies,” Silva said.
The study surveyed more than 30,000 U.S. mobile users over age 13. There were 234 million such users in total, unchanged since comScore’s last quarterly report.