Research In Motion used to be the gold standard in the smartphone space. And while the BlackBerry still has a formidable user base, the tide is changing with each passing day.
As Enterprise Mobile Today reports, mobile devices running the Android mobile OS picked up 6.5 percentage points in overall market share in the past three months, while RIM’s BlackBerry lost almost 3 percent.
And Apple’s iPhone share was unchanged at just over 24 percent in the U.S.
More important, especially for vendors and app developers, more than 58.7 million people in the U.S. owned a smartphone in the three-month period ending in September, a surge of 15 percent from the prior three-month period.
The latest smartphone industry numbers from market researcher comScore paints a familiar picture as devices running the Android mobile operating system continue to gain market and mindshare at the expense, primarily, of Research In Motion’s BlackBerry smartphones.
In the three months ending in September, comScore’s report found that RIM (NASDAQ: RIMM) managed to cling to its lead among smartphone owners in the U.S. at 37.3 percent, but that was down 2.8 percent from the end of June while Android-based devices rose 6.5 percent to 21.4 percent of the overall market.