Report says Android users will switch to iPhone less often in 2023

Apple is the king of smartphone sales in the United States. The company has been trying to get there for more than a decade, and you can attribute that to the great marketing and synergy that permeates the iPhone and Apple’s branding overall. The study showed that Apple succeeded Android in the number of iPhone users in the US for the first time in 2022, but saw an overall decline in smartphone sales in 2023. Perhaps a more important metric for reading US smartphone buyer trends is looking at the percentage of users who switch from one operating system to another. In 2023, fewer new iPhone owners will switch from Android to iOS than in 2022.

Consumer Intelligence Research Partners, a leading market research firm, is responsible for a report showing that 13% of people who bought an iPhone in 2023 switched from an Android phone to an iPhone (via Android Authority). This is down from 15% in 2022, which would be the highest percentage of people who switched from Android to Apple in his five years (dating back to the 13% mark in 2019). In both 2020 and 2021, only 11% of new iPhone users switched from Android, the lowest number across the data span.

(Source: CIRP)

While this data doesn’t represent the raw number of people switching from Android smartphones to iPhones, the 2% decline is encouraging for fans of the Google-based OS and its Android partners like Samsung and OnePlus. But this means little for the future, as the number of people switching to iPhone jumped 4% from 2021 to 2022, immediately following a 2% decline from 2019 to 2020. Mobile phones have changed a lot in the past 24 years, and with the advent of artificial intelligence, they will continue to change a lot in the future.

The big problem that Android has to face head on is the fact that Android is simply not cool for younger generations. Nearly 9 out of 10 US teenagers use an iPhone. When these teens grow up to be adults, there will be little reason for them to switch from the smartphone ecosystem they were indoctrinated with. On a global scale, Android still dominates, but this is a bleak number considering the US is a major spender in the global economy. It’s good that fewer people are switching from Android to iPhone than in previous years, but if history is any indication, that progress could all be wasted in a year.