Yesterday NPD released a report suggesting Android phones were gaining market share over the iPhone.
Apple has decided to respond to the survey with their own facts down playing Androids share of the smartphone market. Natalie Harrison told The Loop, "This is a very limited report on 150,000 US consumers responding to an online survey and does not account for the more than 85 million iPhone and iPod touch customers worldwide." What is interesting is that she included the numbers for the iPod Touch in with the iPhone. The two do run the same OS but the iPod touch is obviously not a a competitor to the Android devices.
Natelie went on to say, "IDC figures show that iPhone has 16.1 percent of the smartphone market and growing, far outselling Android on a worldwide basis. We had a record quarter with iPhone sales growing by 131 percent and with our new iPhone OS 4.0 software coming this summer, we see no signs of the competition catching up anytime soon."
The IDC report that Apple is referring to also shows that HTC is up 73% and Motorola is up 91%, both are manufactures of Android based phones. Combining the two would suggest the Android market is up 164% over Apple"s 131% sales growth.
The Android OS also has the advantage of being available on multiple carriers and multiple handsets. The iPhone is the only device running its OS and is only available through AT&T in the United States and will remain so until at least 2012.