Add to favorites Windows Phone also increases its market share, and there is good news for Motorola and LG.
Apple devices have overtaken those from Samsung to become the best selling smartphones in the UK, it has been revealed.
The latest figures from Kantar Worldpanel ComTech found that 32% of handsets sold in the last three months were powered by Apple’s iOS software, putting it ahead of Samsung, which suffered a 7% fall in sales to register only 30% of the market.
Overall, it was still good news for Android-powered devices, which make up 54% of the UK smartphone market. However, this figure down from 58% at the same time last year.
Windows Phone devices saw a 3% increase on last year to represent 10% of the total market, but there was more bad news for BlackBerry, which lost almost 2% of its market share, down from 5% to 3.4%.
"Consumers are far more tech savvy than they were just a few years ago, said Kantar strategic insight director Dominic Sunnebo.
"The rising commoditisation of smartphones means we increasingly rely on online views and handset cost to drive our decision making."
Original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) LG and Motorola were singled out by Kantar as performing particularly impressively in recent months, with the latter’s budget Moto G device coming in for particular praise.
Motorola’s Moto G
The device led Motorola, recently bought by Chinese manufacturer Lenovo for nearly $3bn from Google, to gain a 6% share of the UK smartphone market, despite having a virtually non-existent market share a few months ago.
"Motorola was nowhere in Europe before the Moto G launched in November last year," Sunnebo said. "It highlights the speed at which a quality budget phone can disrupt a market."
Sony also saw a rise in sales, with a 3.4% increase leading to the company claiming 9% of total market sales, however there was further bad news for HTC, which recorded a 5% drop to register only 4% of the total smartphone market.
Kantar stated that smartphone penetration in Britain now stands at 70%, with 86% of devices sold in the past three months being smartphones.
Across Europe, Android remains the top OS with a 69% share, while Apple holds second position with a 19% share.
Windows came third with 9.7% of the market.
