comScore May 2013: No good news for WP and Blackberry.

comScore released their May 2013 US smartphone market share numbers today, showing that Blackberry's fall resumed after what seemed like a possible bottom.  Oh well.

Top Smartphone Platforms 3 Month Avg. Ending May 2013 vs. 3 Month Avg. Ending Feb. 2013 Total U.S. Smartphone Subscribers Age 13+ Source: comScore MobiLens
	Share (%) of Smartphone Subscribers
	Feb-13	May-13	Point Change
Total Smartphone Subscribers	100.0%	100.0%	N/A
Android	51.7%	52.4%	0.7
Apple	38.9%	39.2%	0.3
BlackBerry	5.4%	4.8%	-0.6
Microsoft	3.2%	3.0%	-0.2

Note that neither Blackberry nor Microsoft show any signs of a bright future.  For three straight months now, WP has been stuck at 3.0% market share in the US -- a bottoming without any upswing -- while Blackberry continued to decline, albeit at a slower rate than last year.

Zoom in closer to the last 12 months, and it seems that Android has found its groove at the top of the market with very limited movement.

A closer look at the last four months show that market share has been relatively stable, even as the number of smart phone owners continues to expand.  It's starting to look like Blackberry and Microsoft responded too late and too slowly to the rapidly changing market.  In the case of Blackberry, BB10 came out after smart phones surpassed the 50% share of the US mobile market (Sept 2012).

You like sobering stats, don't you?  If overnight the remaining non-smart phone mobile users in the US were to switch to a smart phone, and were split evenly between Windows Phone and Blackberry, both platforms would still be behind Android and iPhone.  Now, obviously that scenario would never happen, but it points to just how daunting it is for either WP or Blackberry to get back into the game, and why speed matters.

In a year from now, smart phones will increase their share of the total mobile market, and Android and iPhones will continue to outsell and dominate not just the US market but the global market as well.  And for all the talk that Microsoft is picking up its cadence and moving faster, the problem still remains: They have to move faster than Google, not just faster than their previously sloth-like pace.