Smartphone manufacturers ship millions of smartphones every year. Companies like Samsung, Apple, Huawei and others ship these phones around the world in their millions.
However, they never reveal their actual sales per model unless they pass a critical milestone like “10 million” sales. Well, we have 3rd party firms that track such sales and they have some interesting finds.
Accoding to the research firm Omdia, the iPhone XR was the world’s most popular smartphone in 2019.
The iPhone XR was announced in September 2018 with its more expensive siblings: the XS and the XS Max. The differentiating factor was that it was priced at $750 for the base model and the XS started at $1000. For most people, it was a better deal than the more expensive XS and XS Max and probably that is why it sold more units.
Apparently the iPhone XR sold 46.3 million units in 2019 which solidified it at the top of the best selling smartphones of the year.
The interesting bit is that the iPhone 11 was not too far off. The successor to the XR sold 37.3 million units which is an insane number for a phone that was only released in September of 2019. It means that Apple was selling over 12 million iPhone 11s a month in 2019.
Position 3-5 were dominated by the A versions of the Samsung Galaxy models. These have proven to be quite popular with people and were sandwiched between the various iPhone models.
This is how the top 10 list looked like for 2019.
- iPhone XR – 46.3 million
- iPhone 11 – 37.3 million
- Galaxy A10 – 30.3 million
- Galaxy A50 – 24.2 million
- Galaxy A20 – 19.2 million
- iPhone 11 Pro Max – 17.6 million
- iPhone 8 – 17.4 million
- Redmi Note 7 – 16.4 million
- iPhone 11 Pro 15.5 million
- Galaxy J2 core – 15.2 million
The iPhone 8 is the oldest phone in this list and for a 2017 smartphone, it sold very well last year. The reason could be that it was the cheapest brand new iPhone sold by Apple, starting at $449 for the base model.
