comScore October 2012: Android is NOT going down.

Some reports earlier this week had indicated that Apple was gaining ground on Android in the US.  Today's comScore report shows this is not the case; in fact, Android grew, iOS stalled, and RIM and Windows Phone shrank.

Top Smartphone Platforms 3 Month Avg. Ending Oct. 2012 vs. 3 Month Avg. Ending Jul. 2012 Total U.S. Smartphone Subscribers Ages 13+ Source: comScore MobiLens
	Share (%) of Smartphone Subscribers
	Jul-12	Oct-12	Point Change
Total Smartphone Subscribers	100.0%	100.0%	N/A
Google	52.2%	53.6%	1.4
Apple	33.4%	34.3%	0.9
RIM	9.5%	7.8%	-1.7
Microsoft	3.6%	3.2%	-0.4

What's interesting is that Google's market share increased quite a lot -- sales from Jelly Bean OS? -- while Microsoft's declined significantly.  Microsoft's October 0.4 percentage point drop was the steepest since Dec. 2011's 0.5 pp drop.

If you break down the total number of smart phone users (121.3M), Microsoft's Windows Phone's real smart phone numbers shrank (-413.2K) from the previous month, even as total number of smart phone owners continued to increase (+2.0M).  If Microsoft lost actual users, this could be an early signal that its existing users were not satisfied with what Microsoft introduced when WP8 was unveiled.

Let's take this a step further.  If RIMM completely collapsed, and the US market were to become 100% saturated with smartphones, assuming that RIMM's market share and the remaining 48.1% were divvied up three ways equally and that there was little poaching from Android and iPhone, Microsoft would still have under 20% market share.

Going back over 2 years: comScore smart phone market share

This is where the decline in actual users becomes starkly important: When anyone from Microsoft starts trash-talking about Android or iPhone, they're talking out of their rear ends.  They've tried all sorts of gimmicks, and instead of gaining users, they're now at their smallest number of users, ever.

Maybe that's why Nokia is now exploring Linux, aka Android?  If Nokia abandons WP, Microsoft's future will indeed be bleak.