According to the IDC report, in the second quarter of this year, global smartphone shipments increased by 42.2%, amounting to 154 million devices. The lion’s share in 85% of deliveries belongs to the undisputed leaders in the market of operating systems – Android and iOS.
Recently, similar reports were published by other analytical agencies (we wrote about this earlier). Thus, according to Strategy Analytics, the growth of smartphone shipments to the global market in the second quarter of 2012 increased by 32% to 146.1 million devices, according to Canalys – by 46.9% to 158.3 million smartphones.
According to the IDC report, Android retains the status of the leading smartphone platform, which occupies a global market share of 68.1%, which in quantitative terms equals 104.8 million devices. Thus, Android managed to four times exceed the performance of the iOS platform, which accounted for 16.9% (last year, Apple’s market share was slightly higher – 18.8%). As IDC senior analyst Kevin Restivo notes, “the mobile OS market is now beyond any doubt a place of struggle for only two main platforms.”
In comparison with the same period of 2011, some platforms showed tremendous growth: Android – by 106.5% (Samsung produces 44% of smartphones based on it), Windows Phone – an increase of 115.3%. Moreover, Microsoft owes such a significant indicator to Nokia, which has doubled the volume of production of WP7-based Lumia smartphones. And, according to experts, the release of WP8-based devices will only contribute to the further growth of the share of this OS in the smartphone market and the emergence of Microsoft as the third major market player.
“Considering that most of the mobile phone user base is still using regular mobile phones, without applications and many communication functions, the battle in the smartphone systems market is far from over. There is still enough space on it for at least one player,” explains Kevin Restivo.
