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US Consumer Device Purchase Journey – Part 2: Purchase Drivers and Feature Priorities

Device OEMs and carriers spent 2025 marketing AI to consumers who were buying phones because their screens cracked and their batteries died. Hardware failure was the single largest purchase driver across every brand tier and every month from May through December 2025, ranging from 5.6 to 13.2 percent. AI feature priority, by comparison, peaked at 5.1 percent in a single month for a single brand.

April 2, 2026 • 19 pages

Introduction

The US Consumer Device Purchase Journey – Part 1: Market Landscape, Brand Performance & Consumer Satisfaction report of this series documented who owns what smartphone in the US, at what price, and with what degree of brand loyalty. It established the structural foundations: Apple’s 55.9 percent installed-base share and its accelerating gains; Samsung’s bifurcated portfolio problem; Google’s promotional share, which evaporated the moment the campaigns ended; and Motorola’s durable value franchise. This report asks the next question: once a consumer decides to replace their device, what drove that decision, and what do they want in the next device they buy?

This report covers two dimensions of the consumer purchase decision. The first is purchase drivers: the primary motivations that brought each buyer into the market, including hardware failure, software-update obsolescence, carrier promotional offers, new-model availability, financing upgrade eligibility, and brand reputation. The second is feature priorities: the attributes consumers rank highest when choosing their next device, including performance, battery life, camera, storage, display, AI capabilities, ease of data transfer, ecosystem compatibility, and form factor preference. Both dimensions are tracked monthly from May through December 2025, disaggregated across five brand tiers: Apple, Samsung Flagship, Samsung Non-Flagship, Google, and Motorola. The Samsung split is not an editorial choice; it is a methodological requirement. The two Samsung tiers serve different buyers with different motivations and replacement cycles, and blending them yields figures that are wrong for both.

This report is written for OEM product and marketing teams allocating launch budgets across driver categories, carrier promotion planners calibrating the timing and targeting of device offers, retail channel managers assessing which feature messages convert at the shelf, and investors evaluating whether the demand signals sustaining current share positions are durable or promotional. It assumes familiarity with market landscape findings from the previous report. Readers new to the series should begin there. All data in this report are drawn from the Recon Analytics US Mobile Device Components survey, with monthly samples ranging from approximately 800 to 4,500 respondents per brand tier, depending on market share. Statistical significance thresholds and confidence intervals are reported throughout where they affect the interpretation of the findings.

Table of Contents

  1. Introduction 1
  2. 1. Executive Summary 2
  3. 2. Primary Purchase Drivers and Motivations 4
  4. 3. Feature Priorities for Next Device 10
  5. 4. Conclusion 19