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38% of iPhone sales are from former RIM and Android users

By: , IntoMobile
Thursday, June 7th, 2012 at 10:42 AM
iphone

A new survey from the Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP) paints a potentially troubling picture for Android. CIRP looked at new iPhone sales for the month of April, and found that a whopping 38% of new iPhones sold in the month were to people who already owned a smartphone. Nearly 1 in every 4 iPhones sold (23%) during the month of April was to an Android user, up 5% from the 18% reported in the February 2012 report.

This move of Android users towards iOS could be indicative of a trend we’ll see play out in coming quarters with the release of the next iPhone, or could represent normal churn between operating systems. No data on the number of iPhone users purchasing Android devices in April was presented by CIRP. It’s possible that 15-20% movement is considered normal churn, though this seems unlikely given that most existing smartphone owners are tied to one platform or the other due to ecosystem purchases (apps, music, games, etc.). It could, however, be indicative of growing user frustrations with Android.

When it came to U.S. Carriers offering the iPhone, AT&T maintained it’s market dominance with 51% of iPhone owners on Ma Ball (down 2% from February), followed by Verizon with 37% and Sprint with 12%. We expect the gap between Verizon and AT&T to shrink even further as time goes on; Verizon only began offering the iPhone last year, while AT&T has been in bed with Apple since 2007.

[via Fortune, Apple Insider]

 

About The Author

Anthony Domanico

Anthony is a freelance tech journalist covering the mobile beat. He has used all operating systems in existence today, and currently rocks the iPhone 5, Nexus 7, and iPad mini.

  • http://www.facebook.com/people/Russell-Sakolsky/138900518 Russell Sakolsky

    The company that did this survey deals exclusively with Apple products and their published reports only show Apple in a good light. On top of that, it seems that this company is an LLC consisting of only two partners.

    I’m not saying this survey isn’t valid, just it should be scrutinized a little bit.

    Also the survey only had a sample size of 521, which is statistically a decent sample size but a bit small for this survey. Even though they questioned 7,348 people, only 521 were qualified to respond. This means that they were specifically hand picking their samples which is something that shouldn’t be done in statistics.

  • Shea

    I am a college student.  In the past semester since the iPhone came out, including myself, I have seen nearly every single one of my friends ditch their Android and Blackberry counterparts in place of an iPhone.  It’s not just my friend group, it’s becoming all you see on my campus of 25,000 individuals.  I think the real market share will be much more stable within about a year as everybody who signed droid contracts right before the iPhone came out will have had their chance to switch.

  • dex

    Actually, going from 18% to 23% is not up 5%. It is an increase of about 28%, or you could say up 5 percentage points (an important distinction from being up 5 percent). As I’m sure you all know, 28% is a significantly higher increase than 5%. It is good to account for normal churn rates between devices, but the direction of the trend provides clear information on how people are ditching android for iOS. We need data on what percentage of new android users come from iPhone (data points over a period of time) to really make the fairest comparison.