“A recent survey of smartphone owners from UBS Investment Research, as quoted in AppleInsider, paints a troubling picture not just for the Android OS, but RIM and the BlackBerry as well,” Gene Steinberg reports for TechNewsOwl. “According to the survey, conducted this past August, the iPhone has an 89% retention rate. In the scheme of things, forgetting how the rest of the crowd is doing, that’s a pretty high number. Yes, there have been one or two tech pundits boasting how they dumped their iPhones for Android gear, but clearly they are few and far between.”
“The survey reports that the next highest retention rate belongs to HTC, with just 39%. Samsung, currently under siege with ongoing intellectual property infringement complaints from Apple, gets just 28%. Motorola, destined to become Google’s hardware arm and obviously its preferred Android maker, is stuck with 25%,” Steinberg reports. “As far as troubled RIM is concerned, their retention rate has dropped from 62% to 33% in the last 18 months.”
Steinberg writes, “You might also notice that, with all the publicity about the next iPhone, and even perhaps the iPad 3, even if it’s not expected until next year, how you read few reports anticipating any greatness from Android OS handset makers, RIM or those building Windows Phone 7 gear. But that’s in keeping with the UBS survey, which demonstrates that customers love their iPhones, but don’t much care about the rest.”
Read more in the full article here.
Related articles:
Apple’s iPhone has 89% retention rate, HTC a distant second at 39% – September 22, 2011
Survey: iPhone retention 94% vs. Android 47% – August 1, 2011
These articles never have links to the original report.. why is that? I want to show people the article but it needs to have a concrete link back to the report, not a excel default chart that states “Source: UBS”
Also the 515 people were identified as high end travellers.
Dan,
The main reason why: UBS, like industry leaders Gartner and Forrester Research, all charge their clients for their reports.
It is the service they sell. Research.
The original reports cost.
Having just adjusted the annoying default settings my sister’s Samsung Prevail Android phone I can see what all the crapla is about. It does some pretty incomprehensible things, is illogically laid out and generally a terrible experience for those who want a life. So much for any remotely superior thing about Android even though I know this isn’t the top of the line A-phone.
I’ve owned the original iPhone, 3G & now iPhone 4 and “as God is my witness I’ll never go non-Apple again!”
Nice movie reference! (Is that Mountain View burning in the background?)
I own an android phone ($25 per month Virgin Mobile on LG Optimus; can’t justify AT&T’s $80+ monthly plan). It is precisely the illogical, inconsistent mess that you talk about.
General consensus among the tech-savvy owners of Android phones out there is that the stock Android from Google is much more streamlined, consistent and logical than the crappy substitute UIs forced down onto the devices by various carriers out there (Motoblur, Touchwiz and whatnot). Well, my phone has stock, plain-vanilla Android (Virgin Mobile is rather merciful), and if that’s better than those other things, I can’t imagine how crappy those must be.
There may be hundreds of thousands of apps for Android, so the app market advantage may by now be rather moot. However, there is no doubt, these apps are rather pale shadows of their iOS originals. One of the more popular out ther (TuneIn Radio) consistently freezes everytime I receive a phone call while radio is playing. It usually takes forever (i.e. up to 5 mins) to kill it and re-start it. This is just one example, and most others are not much different.
Current Android users are first-time smartphone users, and they are thrilled to have large screen and e-mail on their phones. Eventually, when the market is saturated, these people will find out about the iPhone and learn the value of the difference.
Android has no chance, regardless of the outcome of patent suits.