iPhone May Overtake Android In The U.S. By 2015 Due to Customer Loyalty

According to a survey of 16,000 consumers polled over the past 12 months by Yankee Group, customer loyalty will push iPhone ownership in the U.S. past Android devices by the year 2015 (via AllThingsD). The survey revealed that 91% of iPhone owners intend to buy another iPhone in the next 6 months, while 6% plan to switch to an Android device with their next purchase i.e over 9 out of 10 iPhone owners are loyal to the platform.

On the other hand, 76% of Android owners intend to buy another Android phone while 24% of Android phone users plan to switch to another platform, out of which 18% plan to buy an iPhone. On the contrary, merely 6% of iPhone owners said they plan to switch to Android. The source notes that when you apply this asymmetry to first-time smartphone buyers, two-thirds of whom plan to buy either an iPhone or an Android phone, iPhone ownership seems to surpass Android ownership in the U.S. by 2015.

“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 percent 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.”

So it’s true that platform loyalty is way more powerful than massive market share surges, don’t you agree?