Android dominates global smartphone market, amasses 81.5% market share

According to the reports from the International Data Corporation (IDC) Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, Google Android dominates the global smartphone market in 2014, amassing 81.5 percent market share, while Apple’s iOS in the same quarterly length took up 14.8 percent. Together, the two operating systems accounted for a total of 96.3 percent of the total market.

With Android and iOS dominating the smartphone market, there has been little progress from competing platforms, with Windows Phone losing momentum and BlackBerry nearly disappearing, IDC reports.

“Instead of a battle for the third ecosystem after Android and iOS, 2014 instead yielded skirmishes, with Windows Phone edging out BlackBerry, Firefox, Sailfish and the rest, but without any of these platforms making the kind of gains needed to challenge the top two,” said Melissa Chau, an IDC analyst.

“This isn’t to say that vendors aren’t making moves, especially for the growth segments – the low-end markets,” continued Chau. “With Microsoft bringing ever-cheaper Lumia into play and Tizen finally getting launched to India early this year, there is still a hunger to chip away at Android’s dominance.”

According to IDC, Android phone makers shipped over one billion devices of the 1.3 billion delivered globally, with Apple selling 192 million.

Windows dropped its market share from 3.3 percent in 2013 to 2.7 percent in 2014, while BlackBerry came down to just 0.4 percent from 1.9 percent in 2013.