If you ranked the most popular smart speaker models in the US based on the tech companies that make them, you get a list dominated almost exclusively by just two companies: Amazon and Google. That’s according to the results of a new survey of smart speaker users conducted by the firm Strategy Analytics in July and August. It was a poll of 1,011 people and showed, not surprisingly, the resilient popularity of Amazon’s Echo speaker (which has a roughly 23 percent market share among the installed base of smart speakers in the US), as well as Google trying to elbow its way up the rankings, too.
The results show the Echo and Google’s Home speaker occupy the top eight slots on a list of the ten most popular speaker models. The outlier is Apple’s HomePod, in the number nine spot, with a 4 percent market share. That’s slightly down from a Strategy Analytics estimate published a couple of months ago claiming Apple had a roughly 6 percent share of the market of around 50 million installed speakers in the US.
Here’s the full list:
- Amazon Echo: 23%
- Amazon Echo Dot: 21%
- Google Home: 8%
- Google Home Mini: 7%
- Amazon Echo Plus: 5%
- Amazon Echo Spot: 4%
- Amazon Echo Show: 4%
- Amazon Echo Dot Kids Edition: 4%
- Apple HomePod : 4%
- Google Home Max: 2%
Some additional context from MacRumors about the HomePod’s placement on that list: “While the HomePod may have only a single-digit share of the overall market, Strategy Analytics shared data last month indicating that Apple accounts for 70 percent of the small but growing $200-plus smart speaker market, topping competing products such as the Google Home Max and a variety of Sonos speakers.”
The Echo and Home speakers, of course, are regularly priced as low as $49, that report goes on to point out, compared to the HomePod’s retail price of $349. Also worth noting is the HomePod’s February release — a few years after competing products from Amazon and Google — so the product likely still needs time to filter out into the marketplace.
As AppleInsider also noted today about the survey results, zeroing in on the HomePod’s placement: “Apple has been rumored as working on a cheaper HomePod, which could could conceivably be announced at an Oct. 30 press event.”
