iPhone owners historically haven’t been prone to ditching the brand for an Android, but that may finally be changing. Citing a survey conducted by device trade-in company BankMyCell, CNET reports that iPhone retention has dropped 15.2% since March 2018. BankMyCell says that it collected data from over 38,000 people who traded in their phones from October 2018 to get an accurate gauge of retention through the upgrade cycle.
BankMyCell reveals that 26% of the people it surveyed were trading in their iPhone X and switching to a new brand. Meanwhile, only 7.7% of Galaxy S9 owners traded in their phones for an iPhone, with the remaining 92.3% opting to stick with Android. 18% of those who traded in iPhones switched to Samsung last month.
The most interesting statistic, though, is the total brand loyalty. According to BankMyCell’s data, iPhone loyalty is at its lowest rate since 2011, sitting at 73%. The highest BankMyCell ever measured was in 2017, when Apple managed to retain 92% of iPhone owners (that responded to the survey, anyway).
Apple sells tens of millions of iPhones every quarter, so while BankMyCell’s sample size isn’t totally insignificant, it is just a fraction of a percentage of the userbase at large. Nevertheless, as CNET goes on to point out, this survey isn’t the only sign that Apple’s swoon isn’t just a result of small sample sizes. Kantar’s new report shows that iOS device sales accounted for 36% of US phone sales in the last quarter, which is a drop of 2.4% from the same quarter in 2018. Furthermore, Android phone sales have jumped 2.5% to 61% over the same span.
In other news, Gartner reported this week that global shipments of mobile phones will decline by 68 million units over the course of this year. Brand loyalty aside, Apple isn’t the only company suffering.
