In France Apple doesn't have home advantage and as strong patent portfolio as in US, so it has to compete with the others only on the merits of quality and price of their phone.
So just price then.
Also have any phones actually been banned from sale in the US yet? I thought HTC had time to change their product.
I understood that HTC is from the US banned until they change their product, but you may be right.
Anyways, it's much harder for any non US company to compete with Apple (and Motorola) on US market. Take an example of Nokia which was absolute smartphone leader everywhere in the world excluding US. HTC and Samsung are in the similar position.
We suffer from a strange case of illegal trust between our three main network providers (four if we include the big reseller Virgin) in France, and sadly we have a hard time to convince the authorities to act, since we don't have the concept of a class-action lawsuit in our system.
edit: typos
I'm also implying that maybe under Apple's pressure, maybe with their cooperation, maybe against their will, the various french mobile operators settled on a common price for the iPhone that is way higher than when Orange had a monopoly, which is illegal as far as I know.
"The French market is showing increasing signs of price sensitivity" really is an euphemism for "The French see what you did there, Orange, Bouygues Telecom & SFR". Android has nothing to do with it, really.