Report: Apple and Samsung’s top-selling phones for 2019

Apple have rallied as the brand with a number of its models making up the top ten best-selling handsets in the world last year. It has been a strange year in the mobile market as the results from Counterpoint show.

Apple were buoyed by the success of the iPhone 11, which was only on sale for the last few months of 2019. More surprisingly, a number of older iPhone models performed very well too.

Apple’s strength has been carried by their dominance in North America, where they dominate mobile sales with approximately 50% of smartphones in North America, bearing the iconic Apple logo.

Competing with Samsung

Outside of North America, Apple has found it much harder to compete with Samsung and the competition coming from fast-growing Chinese brands.

The sales figures for last year were definitely affected by the US trade ban on Huawei. All of the top five phones in North America were iPhone models ranging from the iPhone 8 to the flagship iPhone 11 Pro Max.

Europe was more of a mixed bag with Samsung taking three of the top spots with Apple taking the other two spots.

Top-selling brands in China

In China, Oppo and Vivo had two handsets each in the top five with the Huawei P30 the only of their models to make the top five in any of the regions.

Overall, Counterpoint had the iPhone XR as the most popular handset in the world followed by the iPhone 11. The third and fourth places were taken by Samsung’s A50 and A10 with fifth place going to the Oppo A5.

Trump’s administration put a halt to US firms doing business with Huawei, which has meant Google is no longer able to offer their apps and services on Huawei’s new phones.

Impact of the US-China trade war

The US sanctions ultimately led to Huawei having to cancel the release of phones that would have had to be shipped without Google apps and services.

This meant that the Huawei’s foldable Mate X and the Mate 30 were only released in China. Thanks to this it’s probably no surprise that Huawei are entirely absent from the top ten lists for North America and Europe.

Huawei have now confirmed that they will be releasing the P40 worldwide running Huawei Mobile Services and it will be fascinating to see if they are able to compete with Samsung and Apple.

Also read – Android 11: Everything you need to know