14 DAY TRIAL // Data offered by analyst firm Gartner reveals that strong sales of the iPhone X, which managed to outscore both the iPhone 8 and the iPhone 8 Plus, pushed iOS closer to Android in terms of new device sales in the first quarter of the year.
iOS was installed on 14.1 percent of the smartphones shipped during the quarter, up from 13.7 percent in the same period a year before, while Android dropped from 86.1 percent to 85.9 percent.
While the difference is rather small, the boost recorded by iOS comes at a time when many considered the iPhone X to be a flop. Apple sold more than 54 million iPhones during the quarter.
Overall, Gartner says Q1 brought total phone sales of 455 million units, out of which 384 million were smartphones. Samsung, which continues to be the number one phone maker, dropped from 20.8 percent market share to 20.5 percent with 78.5 million sold devices.
iPhone X performance
The analyst firm says that despite the strong performance of the iPhone X, Apple still has a hard time convincing existing customers to purchase new-generation devices.
“Even though demand for Apple's iPhone X exceeded that of iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus, the vendor struggled to drive significant smartphone replacement, which led to slower-than-expected growth in the first quarter of 2018,” said Anshul Gupta, research director at Gartner.
“With its exclusive focus on premium smartphones, Apple needs to significantly raise the overall experience of its next-generation iPhones to trigger replacements and lead to solid growth in the near future.”
Huawei was the third phone market in the charts with a growth from 9 percent to 10.5 percent and 40.4 million sold phones, while Xiaomi had the most unexpected performance, as it improved its share from 3.4 percent to no less than 7.4 percent. This means it more than doubled its sales from 12.7 million units in the first quarter of 2017 to 2.8 million units in Q1 2018.
