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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.
It's only February, there is still time for Microsoft to overtake iOS in 2017.
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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.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
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.
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.
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