How brand loyal are users to iPhone and Android?
A new survey has revealed that mobile phone customers are rather brand loyal after all – with customers broadly sticking with the operating system that they are familiar with.
Check out this chart from mobiles.co.uk – which surveyed 2,300 smartphone owners:
What’s really interesting is how loyal customers are. 81% of iPhone and remarkably, 81% of Android users picked iOS or Android for their latest phone after using the same OS in the previous generation. This suggests that for Apple and Google, convincing users to switch could be tricky.
For the smaller handset maker, the numbers are much smaller, with only 30% of previous Blackberry users choosing a Blackberry as their latest phone, and the somewhat higher 58% for Windows Phone.
We should be careful before reading too much into the numbers: People tend to only upgrade the phones once every two years, and the industry moves very quickly. Chances are that if there was a faster upgrade cycle the Blackberry number would be much lower given the company’s weakened position, for instance. Similarly, only in the last few years have we really seen the top-end Androids pose a real threat to iPhone hegemony.
But it does seem that like how political campaigns have to fight over the narrow-band of undecided voters in the centre, so too do phone companies.
