Smartphone OS Market Pretty Much Just Google and Apple Now
Apple shipped 36.2 percent more smartphones in the third quarter of 2012 than it did in the same quarter a year earlier, but that wasn’t enough to protect its market share from an unceasing Android onslaught.
Apple’s share of the global mobile OS market slipped to 13.9 percent from 15 percent in the third quarter, research firm Gartner said Wednesday. Meanwhile, Android’s market share rose to 72.4 percent from 52.5 percent a year earlier. Remarkable that Apple can increase iPhone sales by a full third year over year and still lose traction to Google’s mobile platform. Android is one hell of a juggernaut.
And the rest of industry? Floundering in the market’s shallows, far, far behind Google and Apple. Research In Motion’s share of the smartphone OS market fell to 5.3 percent during the period, about half of what it was a year ago. And while Microsoft’s share rose to 2.4 percent from 1.5 percent, remarkably, it’s still less than that of Samsung’s Bada platform, which claimed 3 percent of the market, up from 2.2 percent. In other words, in the smartphone platform market, it’s still a two-horse race between Google and Apple, and that’s unlikely to change anytime soon.