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Android OS racks up record 81 per cent smartphone market share

Hitting its undeniable major mobile rival right at the core, Android is celebrating achieving record market share. Openly flicking the finger to both fruit-based competitors and absolutely smashing Windows, the open source OS seized a whopping 81.3 per cent of worldwide smartphone shipments in the third quarter of 2013, according to industry monitoring experts Strategy Analysts, equalling a unit number shifted of a staggering 204.4-million!

Google's open source OS is on top of the world...

But whilst Google’s OS proved to be the ’droids you were looking for, Apple saw its own market share rot from 15.6 per cent to 13.4 per cent from the same period in 2012, whilst BlackBerry may as well start trading under ‘DeadBuried’ having only managed to ship 2.5-million models and seeing its market share plummet off the smartphone precipice from 4.3 per cent last year to a fond farewell-bidding 1 per cent this year.

As to Microsoft and its Windows Phone, the initially unloved OS seems to have improved its reputation considerably amongst retailers, proving it to be a three-horse race after all by rising to 4.1 per cent share, with Q3 of 2012’s shipping numbers increasing from 3.7 million to 10.2 million – success attributed by Neil Mawston, executive director of Strategy Analytics, as being “almost entirely” down to Nokia’s Lumia range.

“Android’s gain came mainly at the expense of BlackBerry, which saw its global smartphone share dip from 4 per cent to 1 per cent in the past year due to a weak line-up of BB10 devices,” said Strategy Analytics’ senior analyst, Scott Bicheno. “Apple also lost some ground to Android because of its limited presence at the lower end of the smartphone market. We expect Apple to rebound sharply and regain share in the upcoming fourth quarter of 2013 due to high demand for its new iPhone 5S model.”

In brief then: great news for Google, a waiting game for Apple, a welcome result for Windows; oh, and bye-bye, BlackBerry.

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