Piper Jaffray (via MacRumors):
Apple’s share of smartphone ownership was up slightly in the Piper Jaffray Taking StockWith Teens survey. Of ~8,000 respondents, 83% have an iPhone, the highest percentagewe have seen in our survey. The iPhone may have room to move higher, however, with 86% of teens anticipating their next phone to be an iPhone, tied for the highest ever in our survey.
Remarkably, according to Statista, overall US smartphone usage (not just teens), shows Android 54.2% vs iOS 44.8%.
So are teens the canary in the coal mine here, showing a future iOS adoption wave as teens grow up?
Certainly, the worldwide picture is very different. It’d be interesting to see a similar teen survey broken down by worldwide regions.
I’m curious about the breakdown at different age groups. I can see teens growing up on hand me down phones, which might indicate the older generation as high on iPhone as well. I guess I’m in between and have seen a lot of people switch to Android, so as they have kids perhaps there’ll eventually be a wave of teens growing up on Android?
Yeah, I can believe that 83% of teens in those brackets might have an iPhone, especially the high income bracket.
Not 83% of all teens in America.
The source PDF does not provide any real demographic information and zero breakdown by demographics.
It says it surveyed two income groups, high income averaging $100,000/year and median income averaging $55,000 per year. Sounds like they completely left out lower income teens from their survey.
If I had to guess, I’d say that the disparity between the overall US average and this teenager-based survey is due to the teenager survey being focused on comfortable or well off white kids. If you surveyed lower income kids and minority kids as well as mid-high income white kids, you’d probably get a breakdown of smartphone types that matches the overall US average.
This study shows that rich kids buy iPhones in America. That is the only conclusion which the data (specious already because it’s a voluntary survey, not a demographically diverse poll) supports. As pointed out by one of the other commenters, the group was divided into $100K+ households and those that were ~$50K; where are the <$40K households? What phones do they use? This study pretends they don’t exist.
My job involved working with teens, typically middle-class and above, and every time I did a quick survey among that group, same result – probably 9/10 were on an iPhone.
My wife, who taught at a high school which served a cross-section of income brackets in our area, saw a LOT more Android phones.
There’s also the possibility, as Dave himself pointed out on his very next post (about Netflix piracy figures) that respondents just plain lie on these surveys. The iPhone is seen as a status symbol, particularly among teens, and it’s not impossible to imagine that some might claim to have one even if they actually carry a “lesser” phone.
Just the fact that their numbers for “teens anticipating their next phone purchase to be an iPhone” are consistently higher than the actual ownership numbers is enough to raise doubts. I’m quite certain iPhone ownership is very high among, as @Sigivald:disqus said, those teens, but there’s probably a significant margin of error there, and serious questions about how representative those numbers are across the rest of the age group.