Nokia’s Dying Symbian OS Still Rules the Mobile World

How ironic is this? Symbian, the mobile operating system that Nokia is slowly abandoning as it refocuses its smartphone strategy around Microsoft Windows Phone, is the leading mobile OS worldwide.

December StatCounter metrics, compiled by Pingdom, show Symbian with a 33.59 percent share of the global mobile OS market. That’s more than Apple’s iOS, which claimed a 22.56 percent share that same month. And it’s more than Android, as well: Google’s juggernaut mobile OS accounted for just 21.74 percent in December.

Remarkable. More so when you note that Symbian’s market share actually grew about 3 percent over the course of the year, rising from 30.25 percent at its beginning to 33.59 percent at its end.

Of course, Symbian has long been among the world’s most popular mobile operating systems. It still dominates the Mideast and most of the developing world, thanks to the affinity of those regions for Nokia’s cheap mobile phones. And evidently it will continue to do so for a while. According to these metrics, there’s certainly quite a bit of life left in it still.