LG picks up US smartphone crumbs, gains on Apple and Samsung

Cupertino's iPhone 6 bounce starts to wear off

Apple and Samsung are still the category-killers in the US smartphone market, but LG has managed to peel a small sliver of market share from both in the September quarter.

That's what emerges in data from Comscore, whose September 2015 numbers show that Apple and Samsung each shed 0.5 per cent US market share, picked up by LG which added 1.1 per cent of smartphone subscribers.

	September 14	July 15	September 15
Apple	41.7%	44.1%	43.6%
Samsung	29.0%	28.1%	27.6%
LG	6.9%	8.3%	9.4%
Motorola	5.4%	4.9%	4.8%
HTC	4.4%	3.4%	3.3%

Apple's iPhone 6 – launched in September 2014 – clearly gave Cupertino wings for a while, but as the table above shows, that boost has plateaued.

With LG picking up the pieces, the total Android market share grew slightly year-on-year. Comscore gave it 52.1 per cent of the market at this time last year, and this year it's 52.3 per cent, while iOS in its various flavours slid slightly to 43.6 per cent.

Microsoft's share of mobile operating systems remains a dismal third, at 2.9 per cent, with Blackberry at 1.2 per cent.

Facebook and Apple dominate the non-Google apps installed on smartphones, as Comscore's table (below) shows.

	Top 15 Apps	% Reach
1	Facebook	76.2%
2	YouTube	61.0%
3	Facebook Messenger	60.9%
4	Google Play	52.2%
5	Google Search	51.2%
6	Google Maps	49.8%
7	Gmail	42.8%
8	Pandora Radio	42.6%
9	Instagram	38.6%
10	Yahoo Stocks	32.2%
11	Apple Music*	32.1%
12	Apple Maps	29.3%
13	Amazon Mobile	27.6%
14	Twitter	25.2%
15	Google Drive	24.4%

Top-15 apps by reach, according to Comscore.

Since Google gets to ship whatever it likes with Android, it's hardly surprising that the Chocolate Factory holds six places in the top 15. Apple clearly needs to try harder to load up its iPhones with cruft. ®