More Android Switchers - Not Necessarily Good News

We’ve long tracked loyalty and platform switching among iPhone customers. We assess the percent of iPhone owners that upgrade from another iPhone; what percent buy their first phone; and what percent switch from Android to iOS. (We also look at iPhone owners who switch to Android, which is a small number in the US.) We’ve spent much time and effort analyzing how this works and why.

Here, we update the basic data on incidence of switching. In the June 2024 quarter, we saw the highest level of switching from Android to iOS among iPhone buyers that we’ve seen in the last several quarters. For spectators of the iOS vs. Android duel, this is always exciting news. For Apple, watching iPhone sales, it may actually represent a troubling sign. 

We think the relatively high percent of Android owners among new iPhone buyers may help explain our recent finding that the newest iPhone 15 models haven’t sold as well as comparable new models in past years as compared to cheaper, legacy models. We also think it may correlate with weaker iPhone sales overall.

In the June 2024 quarter, 17% of iPhone buyers previously owned an Android phone (Chart 1). This is a sharp increase from the June 2023 quarter, and the highest percentage of Android switcher iPhone buyers we’ve seen in the past five years.