If you’re anything like me, you skim a lot of tech news throughout the day. At least once a day, seemingly, there’s another article about smartphone market share coming from TechCrunch, Silicon Alley Insider, and others.

What’s confusing about these articles is that they tend to cite the same underlying press releases from various research firms. To make matters worse, the press releases include many different metrics.

I set out to answer the market share question once and for all. Here’s a great source for worldwide information: http://www.asymco.com/2011/08/08/the-fate-of-mobile-phone-brands/. Short answer: Android 48%, iOS 19%, and RIM at 12%.

How about the U.S. specifically? Here are the numbers:

For those buildings apps, it’s important to consider both the number of users currently on an operating system and trends in operating system usage (in the U.S., Apple up 1.1%, Android up 5.4%, RIM down 3.7% [2]).

Some other fun stats: 54% of new quarterly phone sales in the US were smartphones [1], though only 38% [3] (or 78.5M [2]) of total phones are smartphones. Worldwide, smartphones are projected to take 28% of 2011 phone sales [4].

One last important point here is that iOS users evidently spend more than Android users on apps. See this February 2011 infographic from MobClix, for example. Drawing some very, very liberal assumptions from this infographic, the “value” of building for iOS is $7 x 27% = $1.89, while Android is $5 x 40% = $2.00.

If others know of good (free) sources for consolidated market share information, please share them.

[1] http://www.npd.com/press/releases/press_110428.html

[2] http://www.comscore.com/Press_Events/Press_Releases/2011/8/comScore_Reports_June_2011_U.S._Mobile_Subscriber_Market_Share

[3] http://blog.nielsen.com/nielsenwire/?p=28516

[4] http://imsresearch.com/press-release/Global_Smartphones_Sales_Will_Top_420_Million_Devices_in_2011_Taking_28_Percent_of_all_Handsets_According_to_IMS_Research