Apparently you don't understand how market share, sales and subscriber share actually relate to each other.
- Apple sells 20 phones and Android sells 20 phones. Market share for each is 50%.
- The following month Apple increases sales to 24 phones while Android increases sales to 26 phones. Apple now has 48% and Android has 52%.
- Apples market share went down. But wait, their sales went up? How is that possible? Because the overall "pie" got bigger. Apple might have a smaller slice, but they can still have sales growth.
The point is moot, however, because Apple didn't report sales. Therefore my original post stating you have no data to support your claim is 100% correct. Unless you work for Apple and know something about sales that we don't. If so, please do share.
The only meaningful market share statistic is
subscriber share (or number of
active users). Unfortunately, we don't know this because Google doesn't give us details - they only tell us how many Android devices there are without breaking them down. So it includes phones, tablets, watches, smart TVs and so on. Likewise Apple doesn't tell us exactly how many iOS devices are iPhones or iPads.
Even worse, there are plenty of idiotic analysts who takes sales figures and assume that means the same thing as active users and calculate market share from those sales. It doesn't, and we can look at both Google and Apple official numbers to show this:
- Google stated they had 2 billion active devices in 2017 (at Google I/O). At Google I/O 2019 they announced it went up to 2.5 billion.
- Over a period of 2 full years Google only added a total of 500 million active devices even though there were 2.6 billion Android smartphones sold over the same period (smartphones, not devices, which would be even higher).
- The answer is simple. Most of those phones sold went to people who already had a smartphone and were purchasing a new phone to replace an existing phone (older model, quit working, lost or stolen).
- Apple stated they had 1.3 billion active iOS devices in the beginning of 2018. In the beginning of 2019 they announced it went up to 1.4 billion.
- Over a period of 1 year Apple added 100 million active devices even though they sold around 250 million iOS devices.
- The reason is the same as it is for Android/Google - not every sold device translates into a new user as many people are replacing another device.
This shows the absolute stupidity of analysts looking at quarterly sales numbers and using them to show market share.
Apple specifically said their
base of active iOS users went up (as they did last quarter). Your claim that their user base went down because their market share went down has absolutely no basis in fact. You're confusing the meaning of market share and without exact numbers from all companies involved you can't tell whose sales (or active users) went up or down.
