More U.S. smartphone users turned to Android in the third quarter, accounting for nearly 44.8 percent of some 87 million users, ComScore reported Friday.
Android, running on many brands of smartphones from several vendors, has dominated smartphones in the U.S. for nearly a year. But various iPhone models are still the single largest brand in the U.S., with 27.4 percent of the total, ComScore said.
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Android's share jumped 10 percent, rising from 40.2 percent in the second quarter to 44.8 percent in the quarter that ended Sept. 30. Nielsen found similar results in its survey of U.S. users for the same quarter: It put the Android share at 43 percent, up from 39 percent in the second quarter.
Research in Motion's share dropped to 18.9 percent from 23.5 percent for the second quarter. Earlier this week, Canalys reported that shipments of BlackBerry devices in the third quarter in the U.S. dropped below 10 percent share for the first time.
Canalys reports shipments, whereas ComScore reports who is actually using certain devices, based on a survey of more than 30,000 U.S. mobile phone subscribers.
Smartphones from Microsoft stayed nearly steady in the past two quarters, ending the third quarter at 5.6 percent share, ComScore said. It did not indicate whether those figures account for Windows Mobile or Windows Phone devices.
ComScore also ranked U.S. subscribers of both mobile phones and smartphones by vendor: Samsung had a 25.3 percent share; LG, 20.6 percent; Motorola, 13.8 percent; Apple, 10.2 percent and RIM, 7.1 percent.
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. Read more about mobile oses in Computerworld's Mobile OSes Topic Center.
This story, "Android now accounts for nearly 45 percent of U.S. smartphone users" was originally published by Computerworld.