Stats show that Windows Phone is still far behind its rivals

Mar 5, 2015 06:03 GMT  ·  By

Microsoft might be struggling to make Windows Phone a stronger competitor for Android and iOS, but at least in the United States, all these efforts barely produced any result.

Statistics provided by market analyst firm comScore show that Windows Phone is still far behind its rivals in the US smartphone market, even though it managed to get an increase of 0.1 percent.

Specifically, Windows Phone currently has a share of 3.6 percent in the United States, according to data for the three-month period ending January 2015, up from 3.5 percent in the three-month period ending October 2014.

And while this is indeed an increase, Android and Apple are still doing way better although their market shares only experienced slight increases or decreases. Android currently owns 53.2 percent of the smartphone business in the US, up from 52.3 percent, while Apple is powering 41.3 percent of the local devices, down from 41.9 percent.

Overall, this means not only that Android is now running on one in every two smartphones in the United States but also that it has nearly 15 times more users in the country.

Microsoft's plans

While it's pretty clear that Windows Phone has a really hard time competing with its rivals, Microsoft puts all its hopes on the upcoming Windows 10 rollout, which would also bring a new operating system for mobiles phones.

Windows 10 for phones is expected to bring a plethora of changes to Microsoft's mobile platform, but many of these are already available on devices powered by Android and iOS, so the software firm will still have a hard time getting closer to its rival unless something really innovative is implemented.

At the same time, the lack of high-end devices running Windows Phone and capable of offering users more than just the average Lumia model do continues to be a major drawback, but once again, Redmond promises to deal with this when Windows 10 comes out.

New flagships are prepared for the fall of 2015, including successors to Lumia 930 and Lumia 1520, both of which are expected to come with better designs and upgraded hardware that would allow them to compete against high-end devices running Android and iOS.