Kantar: Apple gains on Android in the U.S., France and the U.K.

That may come as a surprise, given that Apple hasn’t released a new iPhone since September 2012, and the smartphone news this year was dominated by Samsung’s Android-based Galaxy S4, which arrived just before Kantar’s survey began. In fact, news outlets reporting on IDC’s and Gartner’s latest smartphone data have been telling a very different story. See, for example, Wednesday’s Apple’s sliding mobile market share at CNN.com.

The reason for the discrepancy is clearer when you see Kantar’s full spreadsheet, below, which reports county-by-country data with considerably more granularity than either IDC or Gartner.

The world turns out to be a mosaic of very different smartphone preferences. In Spain, for example, Androids still outnumber iPhones by nearly 15 to 1 despite Apple’s 3 percentage point gain, while iOS’s market share actually shrank in China (-3.9%) and Germany (-2.1%).

Note: The headline of this week’s Kantar report (“Record share for Windows phone“) like the one that preceded it, is all about Windows Mobile, perhaps reflecting the fact that Kantar is a subsidiary of the London-based WPP Group, which sells online ads for Microsoft.