99.6 Percent of New Smartphones Run Android or iOS (theverge.com)

The latest smartphone figures from Gartner show how much iOS and Android are dominating the smartphone market. According to the report, Android and iOS accounted for 99.6 percent of all smartphone sales in the fourth quarter of 2016. For comparison, this figure was 96.8 percent in the second quarter of 2015. The Verge reports: Of the 432 million smartphones sold in the last quarter, 352 million ran Android (81.7 percent) and 77 million ran iOS (17.9 percent), but what happened to the other players? Well, in the same quarter, Windows Phone managed to round up 0.3 percent of the market, while BlackBerry was reduced to a rounding error. The once-great firm sold just over 200,000 units, amounting to 0.0 percent market share. It's worth noting that although, in retrospect, this state of affairs seems inescapable, for years analysts were predicting otherwise. Three years ago, Gartner said that Microsoft's mobile OS would overtake iOS for market share in 2017, while BlackBerry would still be hanging around as sizable (if small) player.

Comments

Gartner "analysts"

[wendyo]

Proves the worth of analysts. Gartner is just a Microsoft shill.

Re:Gartner "analysts"

[jeremyp]

It's only February, there is still time for Microsoft to overtake iOS in 2017.

And now: unicorns!

Re:Gartner "analysts"

[Luthair]

Basically the way Gartner works is they get paid to talk someone up. Think of them as an external PR department that has a tiny shred of credibility.

Re:Gartner "analysts"

[JaredOfEuropa]

To be fair, they weren't the only ones predicting this. I've seen Windows in action on phones and it looked pretty good. Coupled with cross-platform technology like Xamarin that lets you produce a Windows version of your app almost for free, I too believed that Windows would gain market share in the mobile market. It was too little too late though, Xamarin wasn't mature at the time and is still not widely used, and by the time some major apps started appearing on Windows, they had already become largely irrelevant.

Re:Gartner "analysts"

[Kjella]

M$ is pretty much killing itself in the consumer market and is rapidly reaching the point of no return and perhaps even crossed over.

Windows (all versions): 85% and stable
OS X: 11%
Linux: 1.5%
Misc (possibly mis-ID as desktop): 2.5%

One third of the 85% above is now using Win10. Half the gamers on Steam now run Win10. With Ryzen and Kaby Lake there is no Win7 support. Sorry to disappoint you, but even as people are holding on to Win7 there zero evidence of any migration away. When push comes to shove I imagine most will begrudgingly upgrade like they did with WinXP.

Re:Gartner "analysts"

[Mr_Silver]

Proves the worth of analysts. Gartner is just a Microsoft shill.

I'm assuming you're talking about Gartner's prediction that Windows Phone would overtake iPhone in 2015?

Whilst analysts have a tendency to get very little right, in fairness to Gartner, they probably weren't expecting Microsoft to reboot the platform twice and, in both times, leave all their previous users high and dry on the old OS.

Re:Gartner "analysts"

[donaldm]

M$ is pretty much killing itself in the consumer market and is rapidly reaching the point of no return and perhaps even crossed over.

Windows (all versions): 85% and stable
OS X: 11%
Linux: 1.5%
Misc (possibly mis-ID as desktop): 2.5%

Not sure where you got those figures. Linux Desktop Market share is now at 2.27%. Not huge but definitely increasing.

One third of the 85% above is now using Win10. Half the gamers on Steam now run Win10. With Ryzen and Kaby Lake there is no Win7 support. Sorry to disappoint you, but even as people are holding on to Win7 there zero evidence of any migration away. When push comes to shove I imagine most will begrudgingly upgrade like they did with WinXP.

Again I will refer you to the URL. Windows 10 is approx 25.3% with Windows 7 approximately 47.2% and surprisingly Windows XP at 9.17%. Even Windows 8.1 is at 6.9% so that tells you how popular Windows 10 is, although as people throw away their old windows machines and purchase new ones then Windows 10 market share will increase.

In the motherboard BIOS there is an option for "Other OS" and I initially installed Fedora 24 (now 25) on the Z170 (takes Sky Lake) without any problems so I don't forsee any issues with the motherboards for Ryzen (when it comes out) or Kaby Lake which has the same LGA 1151 socket as Sky lake and will run on Z170, H170, B150 and H110 series motherboards . It will be possible to install Windows 7 (if you can get a legitimate version or do you pirate it?) under the Other OS feature but like you have said it will not be supported by Microsoft.

As far as PC games go, Microsoft Windows dominates although if you go to Steam and look at the number of games available for Linux and SteamOS there are over 5,000 and some are AAA. Good luck finding the time to play them all.

The majority of people will not upgrade to Windows 10 unless Microsoft use the same tactics when they made the OS a free upgrade if you had a legitimate copy of Windows 7 or Widows 8.1. If you wish to upgrade now you have to pay for Windows 10 and most people will not do that unless they replace their PC which in the majority of cases the new PC will come with Windows 10 as the default OS.

Re:0.4 of a phone

[mjwx]

What makes me feel like this is just some bullshit marketng post is, how do you sell 0.4 of a phone, or 0.9 of a phone... All of those "units sold" should be whole numbers.

Erm... they're talking in percentages. When you're talking in the terms of 446 million units, a tenth of a percent is 460,000 units... Which is still significant.

They aren't selling 0.3 of a phone, they are taking 0.3% of the market which means they're selling 1.3 million phones.
What this report emphasises (without trying to say it) is that the windows phone market has been in decline for years. In 2015 I believe they had 2% and at their peak, 4%. What the report also doesn't say (because when they haven't got their tongue up Microsoft's arse, Gartner are vigorously trying to shove it up Apple's arse) is that the smartphone market is really the Android market.

Re:0.4 of a phone

[TheRaven64]

Gartner are vigorously trying to shove it up Apple's arse) is that the smartphone market is really the Android market.

That's not really true. From the report, the iOS market is around 22% of the size of the Android market. That's a much higher ratio than the size of the Mac market to the Windows market has ever been. Even that doesn't tell the whole story, because a large part of the Android market is very low-end phones, with razor-thin margins for the manufacturer and very few app sales. This is important to the sort of people reading this kind of report, because they care about what the return on investment will be from supporting a given platform. It doesn't matter that Android completely dominates in the poorer parts of Africa, India, and China to the extent that iOS is a rounding error, it matters what phones the people with money to spend on your product have.

Re:linux

[r0kk3rz]

My phone running GNU\Linux is obviously a mythical beast then...

Smartphone life expectancy?

[damn_registrars]

If 432 million smart phones are sold per quarter that is 1.6 billion per year. One group predicts around 4.77 billion cell phone users by the end of 2017, though that includes both smart phones and less sophisticated phones. If we said that half of those phones are smart that means the number of smart phones is somewhere around 2.4 billion. We already know we are closing in on saturation as the remainder of the world's ~6.8 billion people are not necessarily potential customers for cell service.

So if 1.6 billion of the 2.4 billion smart phones in use today were purchased in the past year, does that suggest that on average over half the world's smart phones last under a year?

Re:Smartphone life expectancy?

[drew_kime]

So if 1.6 billion of the 2.4 billion smart phones in use today were purchased in the past year, does that suggest that on average over half the world's smart phones last under a year?

Yes.

Re:Smartphone life expectancy?

[iampiti]

The vast majority of them got replaced because the new version got released.
Me I keep my phones as long as they work. The last one worked for 3'5 years until the Wifi started working intermittently