If you’ve had a discussion about smartphones, even with people not that into tech, you’re likely to have had the iPhone versus Android debate. Common arguments in favour of Apple’s offering include its simplicity, ecosystem, and while not as much spoken about, the feeling that the device is somehow more exclusive and premium. On this last point, you’d expect that Android devices outnumber iPhones and on a global scale they do, but in quite a lot of countries, iPhones are used by the majority of people.
In the image from StatCounter below, you can see that iPhones are the most popular devices in the Five Eyes countries (the U.S., UK, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) as well as in Japan, the Nordics, France, and Saudi Arabia. They are also the most popular devices in Russia but that could soon change because Apple recently stopped sales there.
On the global scale, iOS is used on just 28.27% of devices while Android is on 70.97% of devices. Only in a handful of countries is iOS used by more than half of the population and even in some countries where Apple is the most popular phone maker, it still does not capture 50% in terms of iOS marketshare.
In the United States, 57.8% of mobiles run iOS while 41.91% run Android. In the UK, iOS is present on 53.6% of devices and Android runs on 45.89%. Given these figures, do iPhones lose a bit of their exclusive feel, or are they a bit… commonplace?
Ironically, there was a bit of a stir a few months ago regarding the blue and green bubbles shown on iMessage. Apparently, teenagers have been bullied for having an Android phone instead of an iPhone because they appeared as a green bubble to iMessage users. Google’s Hiroshi Lockheimer called out Apple on this practice and labelled it as peer pressure in an attempt to rope in more customers. Given the current statistics, if exclusivity is what you care about, you’d be better off keeping an Android device in the U.S. and UK.