Kantar data shows big drops for Windows Phone in all markets

Jun 15, 2016 11:35 GMT  ·  By

Despite Microsoft’s reiterated commitment to Windows Phone, the platform keeps losing users every month, and new statistics provided by Kantar show that market share declined at a worrying pace in the thee-month period ending April 2016.

What’s more, it appears that Windows Phone users who jump ship actually choose Android as their next destination, and only a few of them go for iOS.

“For iOS, this term showed the first increase since October 2015, though modest at just 0.4%, from 34.7% to 35.1%. Android gains came from Windows phone owners switching, a trend that produced nearly 10% of new Android customers, while 21.8% of new iOS buyers switched from Android,” Dominic Sunnebo, Business Unit Director for Kantar Worldpanel ComTech Europe, explained.

This does make sense. Android is available on a wide variety of devices that fall both in the low-budget and high-end categories, whereas iOS is only running on iPhones that are generally considered more expensive.

Windows Phone market share

Specifically, Windows Phone dropped in absolutely all major markets, and it all starts with the United States. Here, Windows Phone declined 2.5 percent to 1.3 percent, while in China, a market where the platform has always struggled to impress, it lost 0.3 percent and is now at 0.7 percent.

Europe, Windows Phone’s most successful market, has also abandoned Windows Phone, and it all starts with France, where the operating system lost no less than 8.4 percent of its market share and settled at 3.6 percent. A big drop was experienced in Italy too, as Windows Phone dropped 6.9 percent to 6.4 percent, while in the United Kingdom, it lost only 3.8 percentage points to 5.8 percent.

Overall, it’s very clear that Windows phones are far from returning to recovery, and all the uncertainty surrounding the platform doesn’t help at all. Although Microsoft has clearly stated that it still wants to keep Windows 10 Mobile alive, rumor has it that no other Lumia models would be launched, and the only device released by the company would be the Surface Phone coming in spring 2017.