Comscore has just released data on U.S. smartphone market share for the three months ending in September, 2013. According to my calculations, the report shows that 63% of people with iPhones (or 38 million people) use the Apple Maps app. Here’s how I got the numbers:
Comscore Smartphone Subscriber Market Share Data September 2013:
| Total U.S. Smartphone Subscribers | 147.9 million |
| Apple Share of U.S. Smartphone Subscribers | 40.6% |
| Total Apple U.S. Smartphone Subscribers | 60 million |
| % Reach of Apple Maps | 25.6% |
| Total Apple Maps Users | 38 million |
According to Mike Vorhaus of Magid Advisors, in 2012, 26% of US households (62 million!) had an iPad. Any of the tens of millions of iPads sold over the past year have the Apple Maps app already installed. And Apple’s new OS X Mavericks operating system brought Apple Maps to millions of Apple desktops last month. So suffice to say, Apple Maps’ reach should continue to grow dramatically, particularly after Christmas.
What About Google Maps?
According to The Guardian, at the same time Google Maps usage has dropped by about 21%, or about 16 million monthly users, over the past year:
“But as iOS 6 began to roll out, and introduced Apple’s maps as the default, the number using Google Maps dropped precipitously, even as the number of iPhones and Android phones began rising. (ComScore does not measure usage on Windows Phone or BlackBerry, which comprise only about 10% of smartphones in use in the US.) By December 2012, even though the base of iPhones and Android phones had grown to 112.9m – up 9.3m – the total number across both platforms using Google Maps on mobile at least once a month had dropped, to 74.4m.
Latest figures from ComScore, published for September 2013, say that the total number of iPhones and Android phones in the US has grown to 136.7m, the number who used the Google Maps app has kept dropping – down to 58.8m – while the number of Apple Maps users stands at 35m out of a total iPhone population of 60.1m.”
The Guardian estimates that Google Maps usage on the iPhone has dropped over the past year by about 29 million monthly users. Ouch.