For years now Android has been the leading mobile platform, and every quarter that hold on the market is strengthened worldwide as more and more users adopt Google’s mobile OS. This past quarter is no different, and now we’re seeing Android has almost hit that magic 85% mark for worldwide marketshare, meaning 5 out of every 6 smartphones you’ll see worldwide are likely to be powered by Android. That’s an incredibly significant number, especially since Android’s closest rival, iOS, can only be found on 1 in 10 smartphones worldwide, showing just how massive the gap between Apple and Google’s operating systems have truly become. This is possible because smaller OEMs have stepped up to the plate and have produced some incredibly compelling products, outshining those made by Apple and Samsung this past quarter by taking marketshare from each.
Today’s worldwide marketshare survey has been produced by Strategy Analytics, and the numbers are showing some very interesting trends. First off the exact market share as calculated by Strategy Analytics is 84.6%, the largest we’ve ever seen Android, while iOS fell from 13.4% to 11.9% from a year ago. Windows Phone also dropped in worldwide market share from 3.8% last year to 2.7% this year, while Blackberry seems to be holding on for dear life at 0.6% marketshare, a nearly 2% drop since this time last year. Overall smartphone sales growth has slowed significantly, though, and the firm is showing the market’s slowest growth in five years. at 26.7% year-over-year growth, that’s nearly half of the growth from 2012-2013 which was at 48.9%.
Looking closer at the data and breaking it down into different manufacturers and their performance, we also see some surprising results. Just as we saw from the IDC results yesterday, Huawei and Lenovo were showed some of the biggest growth we’ve seen in a long, long time. What’s surprising is to see Xiaomi not only grow as much as it did, but to see that they’ve now reached the status of fifth largest OEM is the most impressive thing of all. In fact Xiaomi is now bigger than LG as a whole, which is pretty insane given that Xiaomi currently only sells to the Chinese market. Xiaomi went from 1.8% at this time last year to an incredible 5.1% of global marketshare among OEMs. To put that in perspective LG has 4.9% market share currently, Lenovo is at 5.4% and Huawei is at 6.8%.
Apple and Samsung are still the top dogs when it comes to market share though, but both have lost significant ground because of the smaller OEM’s growing so much. Apple went from 13.4% of worldwide marketshare last year to 11.9% as of Q2 2014, and Samsung lost the most with 32.6% in Q2 2013 all the way down to 25.2% as of Q2 2014. This is an even harder fall from grace than seemingly anyone expected from Samsung, and it shows that the South Korean tech giant has a lot of work ahead of them to revitalize the marketshare they once enjoyed.