Windows Phone Usage Stats for November 2015

With the Lumia 950 family just launching, we shouldn’t expect too much in the way of changes to Windows phone usage. But here’s another monthly peek at the Windows phone market.

Granted, it’s a small market: As Gartner recently observed, Windows phones now account for just 1.7 percent of all smart phones sold in the most recent quarter, a new low. As recently as three years ago, Windows phones accounted for 5 percent of the market, and the expectation was that we’d eventually hit double digits.

Anyway, this month’s look at Windows phone usage comes as always from AdDuplex, which bills itself as the largest cross-promotion network for Windows phone and Windows 8 apps. AdDuplex empowers developers and publishers to promote their apps for free by helping each other. And each month it provides a glimpse at which Windows phone (and Windows) devices people are actually using.

This month we see the following trends:

Continued decline of the Lumia 520. Which, one might argue, is a bit overdue given its age. But the Lumia 520 falls to 14.6 percent of the market. Arguably, the Lumia 63x is a more popular device these days: When you combine Lumia 630 (9.1 percent) and Lumia 635 (7.4 percent) usage, you arrive the real number one, with 16.5 percent of the market.

Lumia 640 family has performed well this year. If you don’t care about camera quality, the Lumia 640 (4.6 percent) and Lumia 640 XL (2.7 percent) are reasonable successes for 2015, with 7th and 10th places finishes in November, respectively.

Lumia 920 has continued staying power. The Lumia 920 was Nokia/Microsoft’s last truly successful flagship, and it’s still on the charts this month (at number 9, with 3.2 percent usage share) despite being over three years old. (In the United States, the Lumia 928, which dates back to mid-2013, is still in the top ten as well.)

Microsoft/Nokia has no competition. Microsoft/Nokia’s share of the market has finally fallen after hitting a new high last month. That’s good news. But the bad news is it only fell by 0.05 percent, a statistical anomaly, to 97.02 percent. Only HTC has over 1 percent of share for the remainder of the market and, seriously, who even cares at this point?

Windows 10 Mobile has hit 7 percent usage share. And that’s allfrom the Windows Insider program, as the system hadn’t yet shipped on any new phones in time for this survey. That’s interesting.

And … that’s about it. Cross your fingers that the Lumia 950 and Lumia 950 XL can make a dent in usage share where previous flagships like the Lumia 1020, 1520, Icon, and 930 (mostly) did not.