Apple’s iPhone has overtaken Samsung for the first time ever as the best-selling smartphone in 2023, according to a new report from IDC. The tech giant accounted for 20% of the global market with 234.6 million shipments last year. Samsung closed the year with 226.6 million shipments, while Xiaomi and Oppo saw 145.9 and 103.1 shipments, respectively. Transsion rounded out the top five with 94.9 million shipments.
The report notes that the last time a company other than Samsung was at the top of the smartphone market was in 2010, when Nokia ranked first.
“While we saw some strong growth from low-end Android players like Transsion and Xiaomi in the second half of 2023, stemming from rapid growth in emerging markets, the biggest winner is clearly Apple,” said Nabila Popal, research director with IDC’s Worldwide Tracker team, in a press release. “Not only is Apple the only player in the Top 3 to show positive growth annually, but also bags the number 1 spot annually for the first time ever.”
Popal went on to note that Apple ranked first despite increased regulatory challenges and competition from Huawei in China, which is its largest market. The report comes as Apple is currently offering rare discounts on some of its smartphones in China in a bid to attract customers. The research firm says Apple’s ongoing success is mainly due to the “increasing trend of premium devices, which now represent over 20% of the market, fueled by aggressive trade-in offers and interest-free financing plans.”
Image Credits: IDC
IDC says although Apple played a part in Samsung’s drop in rank, it’s worth noting that there was competition within the Android space itself, as OnePlus, Honor, Google and others are launching competitive devices in the lower price range of the high-end scale. Plus, foldables and talks around AI capabilities on the smartphones are gaining traction.
According to the report, global smartphone shipments declined 3.2% year over year to 1.17 billion units in 2023.
“While this marks the lowest full-year volume in a decade, driven largely by macroeconomic challenges and elevated inventory early in the year, growth in the second half of the year has cemented the expected recovery for 2024,” IDC outlined. “The fourth quarter (4Q23) saw 8.5% year-over-year growth and 326.1 million shipments, higher than the forecast of 7.3% growth.”
Image Credits: Firdous Nazir /Eyepix Group/Future Publishing / Getty Images
The iPhone 15 and its many iterations comprised more than half of Apple’s Q4 smartphone shipments of nearly 2.8 million units in India, Canalys said in its quarterly report. The handset has seen remarkable success in India as Apple pushed the latest models during the festive sales, which occur across online and offline channels in the country while its large population celebrates Diwali in the last quarter of the year and bring discounts and offers to attract customers.
While Diwali — the festival of light — usually comes in October, it occurred in November last year, per the Hindu calendar, which gave Apple room to push the iPhone 15 during festival sales, Sanyam Chaurasia, senior analyst at Canalys, told TechCrunch.
Apple introduced the iPhone 15 series with a few noticeable changes over its previous generations, including USB-C, the capsule-shaped Dynamic Island and matte back finish across all models. These changes have attracted new and existing iPhone buyers in India, where Android dominates with over 95% market share.
In addition to the design-level changes, easy financing, better consumer environment and increasing retail presence helped Apple to make the iPhone 15 series more appealing to Indian customers than any of its previous generations, Chaurasia said.
Apple started selling the iPhone 15 series in India in the first batch of its availability in September. For the first time, the initial iPhone lot that went on sale was locally assembled in the country, as the Cupertino company, similar to other smartphone makers, considers the South Asian nation its global manufacturing hub and expanded its local production footprint.
Apple is still not a top smartphone vendor in the world’s second-biggest smartphone market and captured a negligible share — 7% in particular — in the fourth quarter, according to Canalys.
Chaurasia told TechCrunch Apple’s shipments grew close to 32% quarter-on-quarter in the fourth quarter.
Samsung and Xiaomi emerged as the two leading smartphone vendors in the Indian market in the fourth quarter, with 21% and 17% share, respectively. Notwithstanding, Vivo secured its second position after Samsung in full-year shipments, with a 3% annual growth by shipping 26.1 million smartphone units in 2023, helping to capture a share of 18% — just 1% less than the South Korean company, which saw 1% drop in its annual growth by shipping 28.4 million units.
Image Credits: Canalys
The key reason Apple has not yet been a leading smartphone maker in India from a shipments perspective is the high pricing of the iPhone models in the country, which is home to a large number of price-sensitive buyers. Despite local assembling, the retail iPhone price in India is still significantly higher than in the U.S. For instance, the iPhone 15, which starts at $799 in the U.S., retails at 79,900 Indian rupees ($961). However, the average smartphone selling price in the Indian market is around $250 — unlike $790 in the U.S.
Nonetheless, Apple is becoming a familiar brand in the Indian smartphone market and is rapidly growing its local presence. The company saw the highest-ever quarterly iPhone shipments in the country in the third quarter, with over 2.5 million iPhone units shipped between July and September, per Counterpoint. The iPhone maker also opened two of its physical stores in India last year to expand its marketing efforts and appeal to more Indian consumers.
Overall, Indian smartphone shipments went back on track after seeing a decline for five quarters, with a 20% year-on-year growth in the fourth quarter, with nearly 39 million units shipped, Canalys noted. However, the country saw a minimal 2% yearly drop, with 148.6 million smartphone units shipped in 2023.
“In 2023, growing investment in mainline retail space proved beneficial not only for vendors but also allowed the overall market to stabilize,” Chaurasia said in the report. “Canalys expects the Indian smartphone market to grow by mid-single digits in 2024, driven by affordable 5G and the pandemic period replacement cycle. But the biggest challenge for vendors this year will be to manage the rising bill of materials costs.”
Murena, a French startup that sells “de-Googled” smartphones replete with its own flavor of Android, is launching an own-brand mobile network as it throws its hat into the fast-growing mobile virtual network operator (MVNO) ring.
Murena Mobile, as the new service is called, is built atop T-Mobile and is available to U.S. customers only. Available plans range from 4GB data at $35/month through to unlimited data, which costs $65, with unlimited calls and texts available across the board.
As TechCrunch reported this month, the MVNO space is hot, with countless companies piggybacking off big telco infrastructure to launch new mobile network brands that differentiate substantively through branding targeted at niche customer segments.
The Humane touch: More MVNOs are being minted than ever
The driving force behind much of this growth is the availability of new technology that makes it easier to become an MVNO — this includes mobile virtual network enabler (MVNE) software that takes care of the infrastructure such as SIM card provisioning, billing, user management, customer support, analytics and more. Plus, with the advent of eSIM, it’s easier (and more cost-effective) to have an all-digital distribution strategy, as we’ve seen with Sam Altman–backed “Ai Pin” startup Humane.
It’s these advances that Murena is taking full advantage of with its move into the $84 billion MVNO realm.
Privacy push
Founded in 2018, Murena has developed its own operating system called /e/OS, which is built on the Android-based fork LineageOS. Users can either install /e/OS themselves on supported devices or procure it pre-installed on a handful of smartphones Murena sells — these include refurbished handsets such as Google’s Pixel 5 and Fairphone.
Murena’s big pitch is privacy, with all of the usual Google apps replaced by open source alternatives, or software that purports to be anti-tracking and privacy-centric.
Aside from selling the phones themselves, Murena has so far sought to monetize through add-on services such as cloud plans, which offer something a little like Google Workspace, with email and productivity tools that sync across devices. With Murena Mobile now thrown into the mix, it has another recurring revenue stream to lean on.
“This approach not only provides financial stability, but allows for a better long-term planning for this service and other future plans,” Murena chief operating officer (COO) Alexis Noetinger told TechCrunch. “It is also a great way for people believing in our mission to contribute to our project, instead of going directly to a carrier that they don’t care about.”
This is similar to U.S. minimalist phonemaker Light, which has offered mobile plans for several years. Light recently switched to a new MVNE provider called Gigs, which touts itself as a “Stripe for phone plans” — a plug-and-play platform that gives budding MVNOs everything they need through a single API. And it’s Gigs that will also power Murena’s foray into the world of MVNOs.
“For us, we can manage and help our subscribers if they need anything, all from a single dashboard — which makes our life easy,” Noetinger said. “And for our customers, they can access their plan easily and manage their subscription without any effort.”
Gigs Dashboard Image Credits: Gigs
That a European company would offer its new service in the U.S. only is telling of where it sees the biggest opportunity — particularly as it relates to Murena’s core privacy-loving target market.
While Murena does collect some personal information, including the customer’s email address, name, address and credit card details, this stops short of the level of data that is often required by big carriers, which are known to sell this data to advertisers.
“We learned that signing up for a mobile plan in the U.S. can be quite complex, even today — most of the time you need to go through a credit check, share your social security number, validate an ID, and so on,” Noetinger said. “So in the process of setting up your mobile plan, a lot of personal data is captured, with no real need for it, increasing the risk of being retargeted later or of having this data falling in the wrong hands. The less data shared the better.”
Murena also intends to bring its new mobile plans to Europe some time in 2024, while it will eventually support physical SIM cards — but for now, Murena Mobile is all about eSIM.
This actually highlights a flaw with Murena’s new mobile network offering — not all phones support the eSIM format, including some of the devices it sells through its own online store. Additionally, customers can’t actually sign up for a Murena Mobile plan at the same time as buying one of its eSIM-supported devices — they have to complete that transaction separately.
“We know this is not ideal, and we plan to improve this in 2024,” Noetinger added.
So today just signals the start of what Murena hopes will be part of a “package” that draws new customers in, and keeps existing customers on board. And this could lead to further product bundling to make the Murena brand a stickier proposition.
“The main purpose of launching Murena as an MVNO is to offer a seamless and integrated solution for privacy-conscious individuals,” Noetinger said. “In the future, we could think about a complete package with phone, cloud plan and a mobile plan all combined in a monthly subscription.”
Your phone’s camera is as much software as it is hardware, and Glass is hoping to improve both. But while its wild anamorphic lens creeps to market, the company (running on $9.3 million in new money) has released an AI-powered camera upgrade that it says vastly improves image quality — without any weird AI upscaling artifacts.
GlassAI is a purely software approach to improving images, what they call a neural image signal processor (ISP). ISPs are basically what take the raw sensor output — often flat, noisy and distorted — and turn that into the sharp, colorful images we see.
The ISP is also increasingly complex, as phone makers like Apple and Google like to show, synthesizing multiple exposures, quickly detecting and sharpening faces, adjusting for tiny movements, and so on. And while many include some form of machine learning or AI, they have to be careful: Using AI to generate detail can produce hallucinations or artifacts as the system tries to create visual information where none exists. Such “super-resolution” models are useful in their place, but they have to be carefully monitored.
Glass makes both a full camera system based on an unusual lozenge-shaped front element, and an ISP to back it up. And while the former is working toward market presence with some upcoming devices, the latter is, it turns out, a product worth selling in its own right.
Glass rethinks the smartphone camera through an old-school cinema lens
“Our restoration networks correct optical aberrations and sensor issues while efficiently removing noise, and outperform traditional Image Signal Processing pipelines at fine texture recovery,” explained CTO and co-founder Tom Bishop in their news release.
Concept animation showing process of going from RAW to Glass-processed image. Image Credits: Glass
The word “recovery” is key, because details are not simply created but extracted from raw imagery. Depending on how your camera stack already works, you may know that certain artifacts or angles or noise patterns can be reliably resolved or even taken advantage of. Learning how to turn these implied details into real ones — or combining details from multiple exposures — is a big part of any computational photography stack. Co-founder and CEO Ziv Attar says their neural ISP is better than any in the industry.
Even Apple, he pointed out, doesn’t have a full neural image stack, only using it in specific circumstances where it’s needed, and their results (in his opinion) aren’t great. He provided an example of Apple’s neural ISP failing to interpret text correctly, with Glass faring much better:
Photo provided by Ziv Attar showing an iPhone 15 Pro Max zoomed to 5x, and the Glass-processed version of the phone’s RAW images. Image Credits: Ziv Attar
“I think it’s fair to assume that if Apple hasn’t managed to get decent results, it is a hard problem to solve,” he said. “It’s less about the actual stack but more about how you train. We have a very unique way of doing it, which was developed for the anamorphic lens systems and is efficient at any camera. Basically, we have training labs that involve robotics systems and optical calibration systems that manage to train a network to characterize the aberration of lenses in a very comprehensive way, and fundamentally reversing any optical distortion.”
As an example, he provided a case study where they had DXO evaluate the camera on a Moto Edge 40, then do so again with GlassAI installed. The Glass-processed images are all clearly improved, sometimes dramatically so.
Image Credits: Glass / DXO
At low light levels the built-in ISP struggles to differentiate fine lines, textures and facial details in its night mode. Using GlassAI, it’s as sharp as a tack even with half the exposure time.
You can go peep the pixels on a few test photos Glass has available by switching between the raws and the finals.
Companies putting together phones and cameras have to spend a lot of time tuning the ISP so that the sensor, lens and other bits and pieces all work together properly to make the best image possible. It seems, however, that Glass’s one-size-fits-all process might do a better job in a fraction of the time.
“The time it takes us to train shippable software from the time we put our hands on a new type of device… it varies between few hours to few days. For reference, phone makers spend months tuning for image quality, with huge teams. Our process is fully automated so we can support multiple devices in a few days,” said Attar.
The neural ISP is also end-to-end, meaning in this context that it goes straight from sensor RAW to final image with no extra processes like denoising, sharpening and so on needed.
When I asked, Attar was careful to differentiate their work from super-resolution AI services, which take a finished image and upscale it. These often aren’t “recovering” details so much as inventing them where it seems appropriate, a process that can sometimes produce undesirable results. Though Glass uses AI, it isn’t generative the way many image-related AIs are.
Today marks the product’s availability at large, presumably after a lengthy testing period with partners. If you make an Android phone, it might be good to at least give it a shot.
On the hardware side, the phone with the weird lozenge-shaped anamorphic camera will have to wait until that manufacturer is ready to go public, though.
While Glass develops its tech and is trying out customers, it’s also been busy scaring up funding. The company just closed a $9.3 million “extended seed,” which I put in quotes because the seed round was in 2021. The new funding was led by GV, with Future Ventures, Abstract Ventures and LDV Capital participating.
