In recent years Android The OS has grown more than any other operating system on the planet, and at the moment it represents 78.1% of the global smartphone market. Combining its market share with that of iOS, we arrive at a unified share of 95.7%, enormous for only two operating systems for mobile terminals. In the base available figures in the image above, Windows Phone it is the third dominant operating system on the market, but its market share is almost 6 times lower than that of iOS and 26 times lower than that of Android.
iOS posted the lowest positive growth for both the quarter (6.7%) and for the year (12.9%), underperforming the overall market in both instances. Although it remains wildly popular in the smartphone market, Apple has been criticized for not offering a new low-cost iPhone nor a large screen iPhone in 2013 to compete with other OEMs. IDC believes the company will release a large-screen version in 2014, but will not altogether abandon the smaller 4″ screen version of previous models.
Considering that last year a little over 1 billion smartphones were sold throughout the month, 800 million of them are Android terminals, 153 million of them are iPhones, and the rest is represented by Windows Phone, Blackberry and other operating systems. The interesting part is that Windows Phone had the biggest increase in market share, it being higher than iOS, but also higher than Android OS, and if things continue, then in a few years it is possible for iOS to lose its second position in the top.
