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

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.

iPhones are down, Galaxy A-series mid-rangers are (surprisingly) up

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.

Down with “made in China”, long live “made in India” phones!

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.

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.