The Smartphone OS Barometer Report was released by Kantar World panel ComTech which is a well known firm that does market research and they are also known to be quite potent on the Scrabble Board. The report showed that in the last quarter the share of market for the iOS in the United Kingdom was only 18.5% while the Android was 49.9% of the sales of smartphones, which is almost over two and a half times that of the iOS. The same time the previous year, Apple had a market share of 32.9% when Android share was only 28.8%. Even in the US the numbers reported by Kantar displays a strong disposition towards Android with 66.4% as against 21.5% for iOS.

Other interesting fact is that it has been revealed as per the report that of the sales of phones in the UK in the last quarter, 69.1% were smartphones and it shows that today 43.8% of the people in the UK are owners of smartphones. Another point that the report stated was that the HTC did better with their phones running on the Android OS (44.8%) than their Samsung counterparts (37.9%), though in actual fact Samsung is said to be far ahead of HTC.

When talking of comparisons one point to be noted was that Apple talks of sales in terms of the number of units that they have sold to consumers, while Android talks of the number of units that they have sent to distributors and retailers. This sort of comparison tilts the balance against Apple because it would imply that those mobile phones that remain unsold and stored in rooms would be considered as units that have been sold.

However Kantar's research techniques are rather different. It collects information from interviewing people who have allowed given the company permission to track them. Kantar conducts more than a million interviews in the European continent alone. This means they would have gathered quite a considerable amount of data.

Another point to be considered when comparing market shares is the accessibility of carriers. In the US Apple was available only via a single carrier until recently and this has no relevance on the market in the UK. All the six major carriers have been trying to sell financially supported iPhones ever since the iPhone 3GS was launched and all these six provide mobile phones run on the Android OS too. So it's more or less even.

Mr. Domnic Sunebo who created the report stated that one of the reasons for the apparent dip in Apple's sales was the timing of the 4S launch. It could quite probably be that the company will be able to recover from the dip in their sales which followed the aggressive marketing of their iPhone 4S. He however stated that because the gap between the sales of iOS and Android was so great, it would be quite a problem for Apple to make up the complete gap.

According to the report, the UK users of mobile phones are extremely susceptible to the price of smartphones, and would by choice select one that is not too expensive that comes with a free monthly plan scheme rather than settle for a pricier phone. This was one place that Apple had not looked onto till the launch of their iPhone 4S a couple of weeks back, during which the iPhone 3GS was "free". So this implies that if the Kantar report is right, then the iPhone 4S should be able to give Apple a hike later on.

What exactly is the importance of market share? As Mr. Charles Arthur states, what does market share really matter if the company is making loads of money6 one way or other?

On the other hand Henry Blodget of Business Insider says that at the end of it, all technologies eventually converge on to a single main platform, because creators of software will focus on the operating system that is being used more by the users and all users focus their attention on platforms that they are comfortable with and offers the widest range of applications. As it is very clear to see, this occurred on the operating system used in computers and even to this day Windows OS seems to be ruling the roost. Thus Mr. Henry opines that the iOS is slowly on its way out and that people who focus on Apple are hanging on to a platform that will not survive.

However Mr. Blodget does not seem to take into consideration operating systems that are being utilized in mobile phones, game consoles or for that matter even social networks that seem to exist in harmony in spite of their different platforms.

One factor to be noted is that people using Android OS are more careful than iOS users and even if the Android keeps selling more that iOS always, software developers could always make loads of money on Apple's iOS.

No one really can say what lies in the years to come. Most of the sales that Android is gaining from are through from those users who refer to buy the low-end phones and prefer not to spend too much on software either, but it looks as if Apple is purposefully not touching that part of the market.