According to on Tuesday, half of consumers who recently purchased a smartphone purchased an Android phone. This is twice the "recent acquirer" market share of Apple's iOS, which made up 25 percent. The next-closest competitor was RIM, whose Blackberry devices pulled a 15 percent share.
This is a huge change from the last publicly available data from . At that time, iOS was king with a 28 percent share, followed by RIM with around 27 percent. At that time, Android had just under a 23 percent market share, according to Nielsen's data.
The results certainly could give validation to the analysts out there for Google's mobile OS. Of course, some analysts have even gone as far as to say , a prediction that has been met with a from many tech pundits.
What we can take from Nielsen's latest study is this: Apple is pretty much treading water, appealing to its core base but struggling to expand beyond that. RIM has some serious issues, and it appears Android is its biggest one. And Android? Whatever it's doing, it shouldn't stop. The growth in market share is quite impressive.