iOS and Android Combined For Record 99% of Smartphone Sales Last Quarter (macrumors.com)

An anonymous reader writes: The research firm Gartner has crunched some numbers and found that Android and iOS accounted for a record 99.1% worldwide market share in the second calendar quarter of 2016, which is compared to 96.8% in the year-ago period. What some may view as even more shocking is that Android accounted for 86.2% of the market share in the second quarter, up from 82.2% a year ago. Meanwhile, iOS lost some ground as it dropped to 12.9% market share from 14.6% in the year-ago period. It's no surprise that Windows and BlackBerry have been losing market share. They dropped to 0.6% and 0.1% market share worldwide respectively. Just six years ago, BlackBerry and Symbian operating systems were industry leaders. Now, they're industry losers. Which third-party operating system has what it takes to take on the establishment?

Comments

We live in a 2 OS society

[The-Ixian]

Want to buy a third party? hahaha, go ahead, throw your money away!

Re:We live in a 2 OS society

[im_thatoneguy]

The question is can Google move Android/Chrome to the desktop fast enough to capitalize on their phone dominance. Apple isn't showing any interest in OSX anymore. Linux has to wait for someone to win and then copy.

Essentially you have Google and Microsoft in a duel where the first to finish assembling the gun in front of them wins. It looks like nothing is happening but as soon as one of them gets an OS and app library that solves both desktop and mobile the race will be over in a near instant.

Major innovation started and stopped with the shift to capacitive touch/multi-touch touch screens and the availability of 2G Edge data. People scoff at Windows Mobile 5 using a stylus, but anyone who has tried to use a resistive touch screen with their finger knows why styluses were necessary. Apple got there first but their first-mover success is rapidly evaporating and they've lost all advantage they once had on hardware quality and design both in mobile and the desktop market.

So the question becomes who gets Photoshop first? Windows Mobile as a Universal Application or Google as an android app for the Chromebook?

Android is now officially the new Windows

[toadlife]

I could see this years ago when Android was still very flaky POS and iOS completely dominated the smart phone landscape. The parallels between the Android/iOS market and Mac/PC market were too many for it turn out any other way.

Blackberry

[maliqua]

Well since blackberry has started using android on its new devices its not even slightly surprising that BB OS is losing market share, i'd be more interested to see if blackberry's market share has gone up or down as a device maker since the switch

12% is dangerously low

[OpenSourced]

12% market share approaches the danger zone. For some applications, perhaps just 5% of your potential public will use iOS. Then you don't develop the iOS version. Market dominance snowballs in this kind of situations, as we regrettably know from the Windows story.

Re:12% is dangerously low

[Nemyst]

Bear in mind that this is sales, not install base. iOS still has a big install base and they seem to be bigger spenders than Android users in terms of apps.

Re:But But But!!!

[BronsCon]

Tinder is not available as far as I can tell.

What would be the point? Who wants to hook up with a Windows Phone user?

Re:Windows Phone

[PhrostyMcByte]

Huge missteps mostly recently. Windows Phone 7 through 8.1 were fantastic -- always smooth as butter, responsive, relatively bug-free, had a great UI, and had fantastic tools for devs. I also own several high-end Android devices and if you could live with less apps I really do think Windows Phone was superior to Android.

10 was a huge step back -- no longer smooth and incredibly buggy. I got a Lumia 950 to replace my aging 920 and only now a year later with the Anniversary release can I say it is something they should sell, but it's still only comparable to Android levels of smoothness. I really miss the lag-free 8.1 OS.

Re:classic chicken and egg.

[Opportunist]

Well, not to say it ain't so, but in this case you're looking at a market where the two current top dogs were rather late to the party and benefited from everyone else dropping the ball big time.

Nokia was the de facto market leader but simply snoozed when the big change towards touch screens set in.
Blackberry had the enterprise market firmly in their grasp, and not only did they have a lot of features enterprise users wanted, they also managed to make having a Blackberry as a manager an important status symbol. A decade ago you pretty much HAD to have a Blackberry to be taken serious in management circles. Look where they're now after a series of blunders and hubris.
And while MS never really had a big market share in the phone business, they had every advantage on their side, they have the de facto standard on desktops and could have worked out something huge with phone + computer tie-ins, in a depth nobody else could achieve. They finally try that but ... too little, too late, and all the accomplish by it now is to piss off their desktop users.

So, I cannot really say that this is one of those scenarios where the early bird gets the worm, grows big and keeps everyone else in its shadow so they can't grow as well. There were some serious mistakes made by the former market leaders and other competitors. Google and Apple won because they were able to predict better where the market is going and what consumers and business customers alike would want.

That can change rapidly again. We're today at the point where cellphones get powerful enough to replace netbooks soon. My prediction would be that the manufacturer that manages to find the right gadget at the right time to capitalize on this and offer something that could make the cellphone replace current netbooks, you have the next market leader.