Apple continues to dominate the US smartphone market, but Samsung is getting surprisingly close

Phone Arena

6 days ago

As volatile and as unpredictable as the global mobile industry can often be, it's hard to imagine the leaders of certain key smartphone markets could change very soon. Just like Samsung comfortably dominates the sales charts of its Korean homeland quarter after quarter and year after year, Apple remains easily the top handset vendor in the US, followed by... none other than Samsung. But while the gap between the two giants stateside is generally pretty large, the latest quarterly report put out by Canalys may cause some serious concern in Cupertino. Believe it or not, Samsung is only 18 percent behind its arch-rival in US market share as of Q2 2025, which is probably going to sound like a huge difference... until you look at the Q2 2024 numbers and realize Apple held an advantage of no less than 33 percent back then.
That obviously means US iPhone shipments have declined between the April-June 2024 timeframe and the same period of this year (by a whopping 1.6 million units, to be exact), while Samsung has remarkably managed to boost its figures by no less than 2.3 million units. Surprisingly (or not), Samsung's regional progress is mainly attributed to its mid-range Galaxy A family rather than the high-end Galaxy S25 trio released in February or the ultra-thin Edge model added to the premium lineup in (late) May.
That's a pretty steep fall for Apple and an impressive rise for Samsung, but Google's numbers are also looking good. With the entry-level Galaxy A16 5G made available in the US at the very beginning of the year, followed by the costlier and overall better Galaxy A36 in March and the even more expensive and more powerful Galaxy A56 earlier this month, Samsung's shipment numbers in the Apple-dominated market could well continue to grow in Q3 2025. Of course, the same is likely to be true for the market's leader if the iPhone 17 family is released by the end of the quarter, which feels all but guaranteed already. And then you've got Motorola and Google in third and fourth place respectively, both of which have either recently launched exciting new products or are preparing to do so in the very near future.
All in all, the US smartphone market expanded by a microscopic 1 percent in Q2 2025 compared to Q2 2024, which... is obviously better than a dip in sales. More interestingly, the percentages of smartphones shipped in the US that were manufactured in India and Vietnam absolutely exploded between April and June of this year, while the number of China-made devices on the market predictably went way down as a consequence of Donald Trump's dangerous tariff game.
India and Vietnam are currently the big winners of Trump's economic war with China.
In addition to making major (and largely unexpected prior to this year) supply chain shifts, all of the nation's top smartphone vendors are "frontloading" inventory, thus attempting to be as well-prepared as possible for any and all short-term tariff revisions. Of course, that makes the aforementioned 1 percent year-on-year increase in shipments feel even more modest than it initially sounded, signaling "tepid" consumer demand in an "increasingly pressured economic environment."
Basically, times are tough for smartphone buyers in the US (as if I need to tell you that), and while Samsung, Motorola, and Google all have reasons to be proud of their latest shipment results in the region, said results might not be entirely accurate in terms of actual sell-through, aka the number of units moved from stores and storage facilities to the hands of real-life users. When you switch to Total Wireless, keep your number & grab 3 mo. of 5G
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