(Image courtesy of Silicon Alley Insider)

Don’t believe that Apple has loyal customers? Particularly in the smartphone side of the business, their customers appear to be slavishly so, if a new study is any indication.

Silicon Alley Insider is reporting that Apple’s satisfaction rate for the iPhone is insanely high -- despite the handset’s recent “Antennagate” controversy or the often-lamented network of its U.S. exclusive wireless partner, AT&T. So how satisfied are users?

According to a Yankee Group survey summarized on CNNMoney, 77 percent of iPhone owners claim they’ll buy another iPhone -- compared to only 20 percent of Google Android owners who say they’d buy another Android device again. That’s a pretty wide chasm of customer satisfaction, we’d say. Correction: CNNMoney's story was updated this afternoon with a more accurate statistic. It wasn't 20 percent of Android owners (Google-branded Android phone owners, that is -- limited to the Nexus One and G1) who said they'd buy an Android phone. It was 20 percent of the whole group of smartphone owners, a much different statistic. We regret not catching the correction for several hours.

Silicon Alley Insider’s Dan Frommer theorizes that part of Android’s lack of customer satisfaction has to do with “the half-baked state of many Android devices out there” -- while Apple’s iPhone is a single new handset updated each year, there are a dizzying array of Android-based devices that range wildly in features and user experience.

For instance, it’s hard to imagine the original HTC G1 Android device receiving the same kind of user satisfaction when compared to more current handsets such as the HTC Droid Incredible or the Nexus One, especially given the enormous strides that Google’s Android has taken since the original model in terms of features.

The reality is that Google’s Android is a fractured market, with a confusing number of handsets -- and not all of them can even run the latest and greatest version of the Android software. Compare that to Apple’s iPhone, which was updated to iOS 4 last month and is capable of running on all but the original 2007 model of the iPhone.

If Google hopes to compete on a level playing field with Apple in the mobile space, it sounds like they’ll need to work on shoring up the customer satisfaction for their Android-based devices first.

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