Ranking of best-selling smartphones 2022: Apple, Samsung, which is first?

News JVTech Ranking of best-selling smartphones 2022: Apple, Samsung, which is first?

Published on 03/12/2023 at 17:20

As every year during this period, the official ranking of the best-selling smartphone models of 2022 is published and, as usual, Apple dominates the debates, and even more so than last year.

Ranking of the best-selling smartphones: who is the first?

Counterpoint is an American organization that offers a whole range of regional and international data on smartphones, electric vehicles, connected watches, etc. And of course, the statistic that interests the most is the best-selling smartphones per year. We are in March, Counterpoint has taken the time to consolidate all its data to offer us this Top 10 most popular phones of the past year.

These 10 smartphones alone account for 19% of total sales in 2022.

We’re entitled to a record because for the very first time Apple manages to get no less than 8 of its smartphones into the top 10. But although the iPhone 14 was released in September 2022, it’s not the best-selling model, but the iPhone 13, which largely dominates with 5% market share.

Samsung owns the two remaining spots that Apple wants to leave with a nice 4th place for the Galaxy A13 and a 10th place for the Galaxy A03 (entry models), where last year the Galaxy A12 was the only model of the Korean brand. Don’t hesitate to read the Counterpoint article for all the details.

Ranking of best-selling smartphones 2022: Apple, Samsung, which is first?

iPhone: a balance to put into perspective

iPhones dominate, okay, but be careful. As is often the case with such simple data, it is important to put it in perspective. It is true that Apple is an extremely powerful player in the smartphone market. However, just because the company has a majority of its models at the top of the rankings doesn’t mean it has the most sales.

What sets Apple apart from its competitors is the small number of different smartphones that the company releases each year. Since these iPhones are very popular, (almost) every version sells as small and undeniably stands out in a ranking like this. But if we see Samsung or Xiaomi release dozens of smartphones every year and Apple is limited to 4 or 5, At the end we get a ranking of the total number of smartphones sold by each brand that is rebalanced. Ultimately, Samsung and the Chinese brand Xiaomi continue to sell the most.

Finally, if we look at the numbers as a whole, we can see that The total number of smartphones distributed was the lowest since 2014 with 1,225 million units compared to 1,392 in 2021. An unsurprising trend in a context where everyone keeps their smartphone longer and longer.

The iPhone 14, a flop compared to the iPhone 13?

If we compare the ranking of 2021 with 2022, the numbers speak for themselves:

2021 : the iPhone 12 ranks first at 2.9% and the newly arrived iPhone 13 reaches 2.1%
2022 : the iPhone 13 ranks first at 5.0%, and the newly arrived iPhone 14 is only 1.4%

The iPhone 14s are all up in price from last year, and the iPhone 14 brings with it just a handful of new features and a nearly identical processor the iPhone 13. The latter is significantly cheaper compared to the iPhone 14, and its 5% market share in 2022 proves it.