Samsung may be slowing down as the top dog in the smartphone market, with dwindling sales compared to previous years thanks to rising profits of Apple in this past year as well as increasingly aggressive strategies from smaller start-up brands like Xiaomi, but that isn’t slowing down Android as a whole for total number of smartphones shipped. Android seems to still be going strong and this is probably no surprise to anyone given the amount of different brands that manufacture devices with the OS on board. Strategy Analytics, a research and consulting firm, paints a picture of how massive Android really is with their latest research data about smartphone OS platforms, and how many devices were shipped from each OS in the last quarter of 2014 in contrast to 2013.
In all of 2014 Android shipped over a billion handsets. That’s a billion, not million, which is almost 10 times as much as devices shipped running Apple’s iOS platform. In the fourth quarter of 2014 alone, Android shipped over 291.7 million smartphones which was over three times as much as Apple’s iOS which shipped 74.5 million handsets in the fourth quarter of 2014, and leagues ahead of Microsoft’s Windows phones which shipped quite a smaller number of handsets in the same quarter at 11.3 million handsets.
Comparing these numbers to the fourth quarter of the previous year,(2013) Android saw a slightly smaller number as the fourth quarter of 2013 saw them ship 227.3 million handsets, while the entire year of 2013 saw them ship about 780.8 million handsets globally. Although they did ship loads more phones than any other handset OS platform, they still ended up losing a little bit of market share percentage when you compare Q4 of 2013 to Q4 of 2014, which dropped from 78.3% to 76.7%. When you compare their market share percentage over the entire year though, 2013 to 2014 actually saw a market share increase for the Android platform which went up to 81.2% from 78.9%. Whether or not Android continues to see this kind of growth in smartphones shipped and market share through the year of 2015 remains to be seen, but we don’t see Android slowing down as the platform is at it’s best ever with the release of Android Lollipop.