Apple Inc. and Google Inc.’s Android consolidated their control of the U.S. smartphone market in the three months ended January, with three out of four devices using their software, ComScore Inc. said Tuesday.

Apple software was found in 29.5 percent of U.S. smartphones, on average, in the period, up from 28.1 percent in the prior three months, Reston, Virginia-based researcher ComScore said in a statement Tuesday. Smartphones using Google’s Android had 48.6 percent market share, up 2.3 percent from the prior three months. Research In Motion Ltd. saw its share drop to 15.2 percent from 17.2 percent. 
 

Google and Apple, with 78.1 percent of the market, are gaining share as more consumers switch to smartphones and devices running their software become more widely available. More handsets have come out featuring Google’s Android operating system and Apple continues to add new carriers, including Sprint Nextel Corp. which began offering the iPhone in October.

“We now have effectively a duopoly in the U.S. Market,” Charlie Wolf, an analyst at Needham & Co. Inc., said in an telephone interview. “And it’s unlikely to change any time soon.”

Google, based in Mountain View, California, and Cupertino, California-based Apple had 74.4 percent of the smartphone market at the end of October, according to ComScore.

U.S. smartphone users now exceed 100 million, ComScore said. The researcher surveyed 30,000 U.S. mobile subscribers.
 

(Bloomberg)