Android again was the dominant mobile operating system among U.S. mobile subscribers in the third quarter, while Apple was still the largest smartphone maker, according to Nielsen.
All told, Android had 42.8 per cent of the smartphone market, comprised of three major manufacturers: HTC (15 per cent), Samsung (10.1 per cent) and Motorola (10.4 per cent) with 7.2 per cent made by others.
Apple with its iPhone running iOS was well ahead of any single Android maker, with 28.3 per cent of the market. Research in Motion, with its BlackBerry OS, has the second largest share at 17.8%. Microsoft 's Windows Mobile and Windows Phone 7 OSes took 6.1 per cent across several device makers. Neilsen based its results on surveys of 22,200 US mobile subscribers.
The combined Android and iPhone users made up 71 per cent of the market. Nielsen found that the two groups downloaded 83% of all mobile apps downloaded in the prior 30 days.
Forty-four percent of all US mobile phone users now have smartphones, Nielsen said. For the period of roughly the second quarter, Nielsen said 40 per cent of mobile users owned smartphones and that 40 per cent used Android, about 3 percentage points below the third-quarter result. In that second-quarter period, the iPhone had 28 per cent of the market and the BlackBerry had 19 per cent.
Matt Hamblen covers mobile and wireless, smartphones and other handhelds, and wireless networking for Computerworld. Follow Matt on Twitter at @matthamblen or subscribe to Matt's RSS feed . His e-mail address is mhamblen@computerworld.com .
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