Research: Android users are more loyal than Apple iPhone users

CIRP (Consumer Intelligence Research Partners) today released a new report detailing consumer loyalty to smartphones. While Apple often touts “converters” as the growth area for the iPhone, the latest CIRP data claims that Android users are actually more loyal than iPhone users, at least for the past 12 months.

CIRP Research:

According to CIRP, its research shows that Android’s loyalty is 92%, and as of September 2018, iOS’s loyalty is 89%. The number of smartphone loyalties has fluctuated slightly over the past three years, but both Android and iOS are currently at their highest score ever.

“Loyalty has crept up for both iOS and Android in the past two years, to the highest levels we’ve seen,” said Mike Levin, Partner, and Co-Founder of CIRP. “Basically, For the past three years, around 90% of US smartphone users remain with their same operating system when they buy a new smartphone.”

In a broader context, this means that neither iOS nor Android can win too many customers from the opposite platform. CIRP’s John Lowitz explained that although many people predict that operating system switching is increasing, especially from Android to iOS, this is actually not the case if we look into the graph.

The difference is that many of the analysis is based on the customer’s planned actions because this CIRP data is based on what the customer actually does.

“Over time we’ve seen an analysis that predicts OS switching, particularly from Android to iOS, will increase going forward,” said Lowitz. “That’s absolutely possible, but it would represent a significant change from the long-term trend. These analyses are based on asking what consumer plan or intend to do, which as we know is highly subjective and often more aspirational than realistic. The CIRP loyalty analysis is based on what consumers actually did in the most recent quarter.”

During Apple’s quarterly earnings release, Tim Cook often touted “switchers, first-time buyers of smartphones and existing customers” as a strong driving force for iPhone sales. However, if you trust CIRP’s smartphone loyalty data, it seems that the switcher may only account for a small portion of the iPhone buyer.

The CIRP survey results are based on quarterly surveys, each consisting of 500 samples.

Have you switched from iOS to Android recently and vice versa? Please let us know in the comments. Being an Android User I’ve switched to iPhone and came back to Android within 6 months 🙂