It’s time for the August installment of our Windows Phone statistics report. We take a look at first signs of how Lumia 1020 is doing, cover a couple of previously uncovered markets and witness a new number 2 Windows Phone in India. Read on to find out more.
Data source
This report is based on data collected from 1,009 Windows Phone apps running AdDuplex SDK v.2. The raw data analyzed was collected over the day of August 14th, 2013 (UTC time) unless otherwise stated. We have made every attempt to consolidate different reported phone model names under their canonical retail model names, but it is possible that some of the rare model name variations were not accounted for.
Worldwide stats
Nokia Lumia 520 continues its march to total domination, squeezing the market share from all the other Windows Phones in otherwise uneventful month for the global top 10. The only other notable development is Lumia 720 swapping places with 610. Read on for the likely reason for that change.
If we take just the Windows Phone 8 devices we can see that Lumia 52x make up almost 30% of them all.
The biggest question everyone is asking is how the critically acclaimed Nokia Lumia 1020 is doing. It has been on the market for only few weeks and only in the US, so it’s no surprise that it doesn’t show up in top 10. It’s actually at number 32 worldwide (no.16 for WP8-only, no.17 in US). But we thought about the ways to gauge its progress and here’s what we came up with.
So far the 1020 was only available for purchase in US and only on one carrier. Just a few months ago we had another US-only single carrier Nokia flagship release – Lumia 928. So let’s compare the two…
What you see here is number of app installations in the first 3 weeks of Lumia 928 lifecycle compared to the first 3 weeks for Lumia 1020. As you can see, the 1020 is doing slightly better than 928. That said these numbers weren’t adjusted according to our own growth (more apps on the network, etc.) so the results are probably slightly skewed in the 1020s favor.
It’s obvious that most of the “competition” is now happening between different Nokia models rather than different OEMs. So what’s the status of the ecosystem on the manufacturer front?
Nokia already controls more than 85% of the Windows Phone 8 market, but it doesn’t seem to be satisfied by that number just yet. The Finnish company has added another 1.5% this month. There were reports circulating that Samsung has regained number 2 position in Windows Phone in the last quarter based on sales. We don’t have any data about sales, but from what we see HTC was the only “loser” last month as both Samsung and Huawei have grown by 0.1%.
We expected Windows Phone 8 to be on the 2/3 of Windows Phones this month, but it didn’t happen. WP8 added another 4% but stayed just a little short of the mark.
There was a lot of noise in the blogosphere about people getting (and not getting) the so-called GDR2 update (build 8.0.10327.77). We decided to take a look.
Only 3% have GDR2 installed and that includes phones that came with it pre-installed (Lumia 925, 1020). So it’s safe to say that not many have got it.
And finally let’s take a look at something that could be useful for developers. Here’s how Windows Phone 8 devices with 1gb of RAM stack up against their smaller (cheaper) 512mb siblings:
It’s clear that if your app or game doesn’t support 512mb devices you are missing out on more than half of your target market.
Let’s move on to the country specific stats and start with US as usual.
United States
Not much is happening at the top of US chart, but then we see a Lumia 521 gaining steam (from 5% to 8%) as well as 928 getting another percent. It will be interesting to see if AT&T’s Lumia 520 and Lumia 1020 break into the top 10 next month.
Seeing the progress of Lumia 521 it’s no surprise that T-Mobile is the biggest gainer this month, when we take a look at US carriers (15% to 19%). Both Verizon and AT&T have dropped by few percent, but the status quo is preserved for now.
France
France is one of the countries where Windows Phone does reasonably well and for a long time it was one of the few countries where not Nokia, but HTC had the number one phone. When we last looked at France 2 months ago the 8S was still the number one WP there. As you can see from the chart above this is no longer the case. Not only had Lumia 520 taken the crown from HTC 8S, but it also managed to gain almost double of former leader’s market share. Amazing achievement in such a short term.
Spain
Spain was always an odd market for Windows Phone. Being the neighbor to 2 Windows Phone’s stronger markets (Italy and France) it never showed any love for the platform. Is it about to change? Hard to say. Even though Lumia 520 has the top spot there it’s still followed by 3 WP7 models that make up close to 50% of the market which was never really hot in the WP7 days. The time will tell and we will keep an eye on it.
Sweden
I don’t think we’ve covered Sweden before, but knowing that Skype for Windows Phone is made there it’s only fair to correct that mistake. Lumia 920 has 40% of the Swedish market. That’s probably the biggest share for the [former?] flagship we’ve seen anywhere. It’s also interesting to see ATIV S at number 6, ahead of both HTC models.
The Baltics
We are based in Lithuania and we have the urge to cover it every time, even though it doesn’t fit our “minimum reasonable unique phones” criteria. But we try to be objective and we don’t. But this time we decided to cover it by combining the stats with our Baltic neighbors – Latvia and Estonia. Lumia 800 is still the most popular phone here, but it’s followed by four WP8 models, which is a good sign.
India
India became the second country we tend to cover every month. And it seems there are new developments there every single time. The 520 continues to grow (+5%), that is no surprise. But what surprised us was Lumia 720 surpassing 620 to take the second spot. We’ve tried to do a very unscientific poll on Twitter to figure out what’s caused this (maybe there was a special deal or something), but from the responses we got it seems that people just like bigger screens. And that sounds like a good sign for Lumia 625 when it goes on sale in India.
Thailand
Another new country (for our reports) is Thailand and it seems like it’s basically WP8-only. The top 3 lines up by price and this is the first time we see Lumia 625 in the top 10.
Argentina
And let’s wrap up the geographical stats by covering Argentina. The mid-range WP7 Lumia 710 owns more than half of Argentinian market. It’s followed by Lumia 620 but the gap is still huge. Let’s hope the situation changes in the near future.
New unidentified devices
Here’s what caught our eye:
- Nokia RM-955 – yes, we’ve covered this before (in June), but we are seeing more and more of it which probably means an impending release (likely at the Nokia’s September event). To reiterate this is something of higher end variety (with WXGA screen) and most of the hits are coming from China, so it could end up being just a regional variant of the 92x or 1020.
- Nokia RM-937 – now this is something interesting. It has a ScaleFactor of 150. Why is it interesting? All higher end Nokia phones so far had WXGA screens (ScaleFactor of 160) and Samsung and HTC used 720p screens (SF 150). So it means that either this is a 720p phone from Nokia which is unlikely, or this same scale factor would probably make sense on a 1080p device with bigger screen. So my guess is that this is an upcoming Nokia phablet. It’s running WP version 8.0.10492.
- Nokia RM-927 – same as RM-937 but running on the Verizon network.
- Nokia RM-940 – again ScaleFactor of 150, but running on AT&T.
- Samsung SGH-I187 – and something new from Samsung. ScaleFactor of 150. Running on AT&T. Could be just a version of ATIV S for AT&T, but hopefully it’s something more than that.
About AdDuplex
AdDuplex is the largest cross-promotion network for Windows Phone and Windows 8 apps empowering developers and publishers to promote their apps for free by helping each other. AdDuplex was established in January 2011 in Vilnius, Lithuania. As of August 2013, more than 3,600 apps actively use AdDuplex to gain more visibility.