comScore: Apple is number three among EU5 smartphone vendors

comScore (http://www.comscore.com), a company that “measures the digital world,” has released data from the comScore MobiLens service analyzing growth trends of the smartphone platforms across the five leading European markets (France, Germany, Italy, Spain and the United Kingdom). In July 2011, nearly one in four smartphone users in EU5 reported using smartphones running on the Google Android platform.

HTC had the highest market share among mobile original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), accounting for 34.6 percent of Android devices used across the region in this period, followed closely by Samsung with 31.7 percent of Android devices.

“Smartphone adoption has seen significant growth from the previous year, driven in large part by the increasing popularity of the Google Android platform,” says Jeremy Copp, comScore Europe vice president for Mobile. “Although Symbian continues to lead the EU5 smartphone market, Android is gaining fast and recently passed Apple to become the second most popular platform. Network operators, publishers and advertisers looking to effectively reach the European mobile audience must pay close attention to the continued growth of Android in the region, as it will likely have far-reaching implications for the mobile media landscape.”

Android’s growth over the past year outpaced that of other top smartphone platforms by a significant margin, with the Apple iOS and RIM platforms each experiencing gains of only slightly more than one percentage point, according to comScore. Meanwhile, Symbian’s and Microsoft’s share of the smartphone platform market declined, with Symbian conceding a sizeable percentage of the market.

In July 2011, 19.7 million EU5 smartphone users were using Android mobile devices, with the greatest number of users in the UK (6.3 million), followed by France (4.5) and Germany (4.0 million). Across EU5, HTC owned the largest share of the Android device market at 34.6 percent, followed closely by Samsung at 31.7 percent. According to comScore, the iOS has 20.3%, up 1.2% from the year-ago period.