Apple’s customer loyalty will drive market share gains sufficient enough to surpass Android in the U.S. market by 2015, according to a survey of 16,000 smartphone users conducted by technology research and consulting firm Yankee Group.
Apple continues to gain share against all Android devices. While Samsung may have garnered huge press attention from its Galaxy S IV announcement, consumer intent to buy Samsung phones is less than half compared to iPhones in the U.S., according to the survey.
While buying intent for new customers to both Apple’s and Android’s ecosystem is about the same, the survey reveals that platform loyalty is not. A mere 9% of Apple owners plans to switch to another platform with their next phone purchase, while 24% (nearly three times as many) of Android owners plan to defect from the Android platform.
The survey was conducted in the past 12 months and about half of the respondents were Android users and 30% owned iPhones. Here’s a particularly intriguing survey statistic: 91% of iPhone owners plan to stay with the platform while 76% of Android users plan to stay with that platform. What’s more, three quarters of users planning to switch from Android intend on buying an iPhone.
According to the survey, 34% of the U.S. population today owns an Android phone, and Android’s share will remain at 34% from 2014 through 2017; 20% of the U.S. population owns an iPhone and that share will increase to 27% in 2014, 33% in 2015, 37% in 2016, and 42% in 2017.
The survey shows that 66% of the U.S. population currently owns a smartphone; in 2017, 86% of the U.S. will own a smartphone.
Apple owners are more loyal to their platform than Android owners, the survey says.
“Of all the smartphone ecosystems, iPhone owners are the least likely to defect from Apple when making their next smartphone purchase,” according to the survey.
“An easy way to think beyond the numbers about why Apple gains share is to use an analogy referred to as the leaky bucket theory,” according to the Yankee Group survey. “Think of the Apple and Android ecosystems as two buckets of water. New smartphone buyers—mostly upgrading feature phone owners—fall like rain into the two big buckets about equally, with a smaller number falling into Windows Phone and BlackBerry buckets. However, the Android bucket leaks badly, losing about one in five of all the owners put into it. The Apple bucket leaks only about 7% of its contents, so it retains more of the customers that fall into it. The Apple bucket will fill up faster and higher than the Android one, regardless of the fact that the Apple bucket may have had fewer owners in it to begin with.”