US smartphone owners prefer Android OS

The majority of Americans who purchased a new smartphone over the past three months chose a device running on Android as opposed to Apple's iOS or other rival operating systems, according to a survey released September 26 by Nielsen.

The majority of Americans who purchased a new smartphone over the past three months chose a device running on Android as opposed to Apple's iOS or other rival operating systems, according to a survey released September 26 by Nielsen.

The survey was conducted in August 2011 among subscribers to all networks in the United States.

The survey found that overall 43 percent of smartphone owners in the United States had a device that ran on Google's Android operating system; however when the parameters of the survey were narrowed to only smartphone owners who had purchased a new device in the three months prior to August, the percentage of those choosing Android increased to 53 percent.

Apple's rival iOS operating system was the choice for 28 percent of all smartphone owners in the USA, and this percentage remained unchanged when narrowed to just include purchases over the past three months.

However unlike Apple fans, buyers of devices running Blackberry's OS declined from 18 percent of all smartphone purchases in the US to just nine percent of purchases over the last three months. Other systems, such as Windows, also lost ground with purchases of devices under the category 'other' falling from 11 percent overall to just six percent in the past three months.

According to a study published April 7 by technology market research company Gartner, sales of Android devices around the world reached 46.8 million in the second quarter of 2011 and now account for 43.4 percent of the market. However in the same study Gartner also predicted that iOS will retain a strong market share until at least 2014 despite the growth of Android.