Apple has never had even 50% of the US smartphone market.

https://www.counterpointresearch.com/us-market-smartphone-sh...

iOS is 60% of the mobile (phone+tablet) market

https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share/mobile/united-sta...

Studies have shown that individual iPads and iPhones are used for web browsing much more than Android devices, just as their users spend more on apps.

So Web Browsing is a very imperfect measure of installed base. Worldwide estimates are that that less than 20% of mobile devices sold are iOS, roughly 15% iirc. It’s almost certain US sales percentages for iOS are much higher, but no where near 60%.

>Statcounter is a web analytics service. Our tracking code is installed on more than 2 million sites globally.

Sorry but this is not an effective way to gauge market share of a browser or a platform. That 60% figure you're throwing around is not an absolute metric. It's based only on visitors to websites that use the "Statcounter" tracking code. There definitely is a large margin of error using this to gather statistics about market share.

In comparison, the other commenter's link is actually more accurate because:

>This report is one of the series of reports which tracks mobile handset: Smartphone and Feature Phone shipments every quarter for more than 140 brands covering more than 95% of the total device shipments in the industry.

Tracking site visitors based on sporadic implementation of a tracker, vs getting actual numbers of units shipped/sold. I'm going with the actual numbers, not the sort-of-guessing of Statcounter.

If you track shipments, how do you handle iPhones generally staying in use longer than Android phones?

(Disclosure: I work for Google)

Neither one is a great way to measure market share. Using tracking pixels is notoriously bad though, because it tends to lead to an echo-chamber like effect. Not everyone with a device will visit a site with the specific browser tracking code, and many people will visit those sites many times from different IP addresses, and even different browsers installed on their device. There are many ways tracking code can lead to false statistics.

Units shipped doesn't tell the whole story either, but it is a specific metric that doesn't suffer from bots gaming things or any of the other problems that using stats based on tracking code can lead to.

That's a misuse of "monopolistic" - 60% is not a majority to the point of no competition. Any developer could write an Android-only app if they wanted, they just don't do it.

Most consumers only handle one phone.

So? Apple has a monopoly on Apple products? Big deal. Ford has a monopoly on Ford trucks, Sony has a monopoly on playstations.