Android users are switching to iPhones at the highest rate in 5 years

In a report released by CIRP (Consumer Intelligence Research Partners) and shared by 9TO5Mac. CIRP finds that many Android users have been steadily switching to iPhones over the past five years. 

While brand and OS loyalty is real, as most users tend to stay with the OS they’ve grown accustomed to,  CIRP, which tracks consumer sales via survey, has noticed a newly increasing trend of Android users switching to Apple’s iPhone. 

The switch by the numbers

According to CIRP’s report, that’s based on nine years of data they’ve collected via surveys. In the past 12 months ending March 2023, 15% of iPhone buyers are recent converts from Android. The company also reported that 83% of iPhone users choose to stay with an iPhone. 

The 15% is an increase of 4% over what CIRP saw the previous year, and they also noticed it was 5% higher than the 2020 to 2021 survey. According to CIRP, the last time 15% of new iPhone users were former Android users was back in 2018. Interestingly enough, back in 2016, the conversion rate of Android users to iPhones was an astonishing 21%.

According to the chart, during this nine-year period, the migration of former Android users to iPhones fluctuates from year to year. Oddly BlackBerry and Windows Phones are listed, but I won’t touch that. We also see that 2% of new iPhone users admit to moving up from a basic phone; some were first-time phone owners, while the majority of Apple iPhone users choose to remain within the Apple ecosystem. 

Final Thoughts

I recently wrote about retiring my iPhone 11 and switching happily to the OnePlus 11 Android phone as my primary phone after years of being an iPhone user. It’s only semiretired because, as I mentioned in my article, many of my family members prefer Facetime.

However, the numbers tell an interesting story about how the Android OS is perceived, or maybe it’s something else. Sure, it feels like every other week, Google’s Play store has another app poisoned by malware, and perhaps that’s the issue. Maybe it’s the whole green bubble nonsense. Who knows? All I can think is that users are switching because the masses are fickle followers of what’s trendy, and Apple products are always trending.