- Study finds that iPhones end up on the second-hand market or in trade-in offers, while Android smartphones are more readily given away when the user switches devices
- The higher resale value and longer software support of iPhones compared to most Android smartphones would partly explain these differences
- Android smartphones remain by far the largest market share
What to do with your old smartphone when you change it? A study by Consumer Intelligence Research Partners (CIRP) reveals that behaviors are not the same depending on whether you have an iPhone or Android smartphone. According to survey data, 43% of iPhone owners who renewed their device in 2023 resold their old iPhone or took advantage of a trade-in offer.
Only 14% of Android users chose resale when renewing their device. Furthermore, 65% of Android users in the sample preferred to keep their old phone as a backup when they didn’t give it to a friend or family member.
What happens to old iPhones and old Android smartphones when you don’t want them anymore?
By comparison, only 36% of Apple users gave away or kept their latest iPhone during the study period. Should we conclude that Android users are more generous and iPhone users are more materialistic? Not really. According to CIRP, the higher resale value of iPhones actually gives users more incentive to cash in on them.
As a BankMyCell survey shows, an iPhone loses on average 16.7% of its value after one year of use – the discount is twice as high (33.6%) when talking about an Android smartphone. This difference is accentuated by the fact that Apple supports iPhones for updates for an average of 6 years, which allows them to remain performing and secure longer than most Android smartphones.
According to Statista, Android smartphones remain by far dominant on the market, with 71.8% market share in the fourth quarter of 2022. iPhones and other iOS devices capture 27.6% of demand. In detail, there are areas in which iPhones have a dominant market share. But they are rare. We can for example cite the United States, where the iPhone and iOS in general hold 53% of market share against 40.5% for Android devices.
It is important to give a second life to your old smartphone, whether it is iOS or Android. The manufacture and even the recycling of smartphones (which remains limited, even in 2023, with still a lot of material not recovered or considered as not recoverable) have a major environmental impact – but it is possible to reduce it if we extend the duration of use of the device by giving it away, reselling it or using it as part of a trade-in offer.
