Google Gets Android App Store Competition from Russia's Yandex

Russia's Yandex search engine is aiming to take business from the booming Google Play app store.

Meanwhile, Apple's iOS continues to lead the United States in overall market share, according to figures from consumer market research firm Kantar Worldpanel ComTech. The iOS operating system held 53.3 percent of the U.S. market for the 12-week period ending Nov. 25, 2012, marking the first time the platform has surpassed a 50 percent sales share of the American smartphone market. That contrasted with a decline in U.S. market share by Android, which dropped 10.9 percent in the period, to end up at a 41.9 percent. Microsoft's Windows mobile operating system came in third place in the U.S. market, with a 2.7 percent share for the period.

Android use has been going through the roof worldwide. In fact, Android hit 500 million device activations overall in mid-September 2012, just as Apple's latest iPhone 5 was about to launch.

The U.S. market for feature-rich smartphones is still expanding at a rapid clip, with two-thirds of new mobile phone buyers opting for devices that can do far more than their old-style flip phones, according to a study from Nielsen released last summer.

Yandex has been making news in other areas lately. The company's Yandex search engine pulled ahead of Microsoft's Bing search engine by the end of December 2012, according to a recent report by ComScore. The global ComScore rankings for December 2012 showed Google leading all search companies with 114.7 billion searches, or a 65.2 percent share, compared with the distant second-place finisher, Chinese search engine Baidu.com, which was used in 14.5 billion searches, for an 8.2 percent share. Yahoo.com ranks third with 4.8 billion searches, for a 2.8 percent share of the search market.

In fourth place, Yandex was used for 4.8 billion searches, for a 2.8 percent share, compared with Bing, which was used in 4.5 billion searches, for a 2.5 percent share, and came in fifth place. All other search engines, combined, were used in 28.7 billion searches for a 16.3 percent share, according to the figures.

The Yandex numbers are particularly interesting because they showed the Russian search engine leading Bing for the second month in a row, according to ComScore's figures. The first time that happened was in November 2012, when Yandex jumped into fourth place on the search rankings over Bing.com, which is now in fifth place on the list.

Yandex is the leading search engine in Russia, employed by more than 60 percent of users, according to the latest figures from the Website LiveInternet.ru.