Smartphone OS Share: Android Tops, iOS Surging

The success of iPhone 6 led to a healthy chunk of market share for Apple’s iOS in 2014, but in terms of total phones shipped, it’s still very much an Android world.

Picture: Getty Images

Gartner’s figures for total smartphone shipments in 2014 show that while Apple had a massively successful year — and shipped more phones than any other vendor in the fourth quarter — it’s still a smaller player in volume terms compared to Android, which accounted for over a billion phones. Here are the sales by mobile platform (which is the most useful metric for developers), compared to 2013:

Operating system 2014 units (000s) 2014 market share 2013 units (000s) 2013 market share
Android 1,004,675 80.7% 761,288 78.5%
iOS 191,426 15.4% 150,786 15.5%
Windows 35,133 2.8% 30,714 3.2%
BlackBerry 7,911 0.6% 18,606 1.9%
Other OS 5,745 0.5% 8,327 0.9%
Total 1,244,890 100.0% 969,721 100.0%

Apple’s strong fourth quarter give it a much healthier share of new shipments than had been evident three months ago.

The lesson for developers remains the same: right now, Android and iOS are the platforms that matter if you want to build a profitable application. Microsoft will be hoping its universal apps approach will boost the fortunes of Windows Phone, but the impact of that won’t be clear until Windows 10 appears later this year. And one other thing to note? Smartphones account for two-thirds of total sales, which means there are still a lot of call-and-text-only devices being sold.

Gartner


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