If you’ve been paying attention to the news lately, specifically any news related to the smartphone industry, it would seem that most of the headlines have been propagating the idea that Apple’s iPhones are setting sales records and therefore are basically taking over the world. Alternately, there seems to be as many headlines indicating that Android smartphone manufacturers are in dire straits what with Korean smartphone manufacturer HTC having well publicized financial issues and many reports indicating that Samsung is disappointed with sales of their latest flagship offerings. Well, the latest data from market research firm NetMarketShare seems to refute this idea completely. The amount of Android devices that are in use worldwide has apparently never been higher.
NetMarketShare monitors web traffic of mobile devices in order to determine which mobile platform has the largest share of network usage. NetMarketShare’s data for September of this year indicates that Apple’s iOS saw quite a sharp drop in market share whereas Google’s Android operating system saw its largest gain in several months. Specifically, Apple’s iOS had a 38.58% market share for the month of September down from a 40.82% share in August. This marks the sharpest drop for iOS since this past April which saw its share drop to 38.81% compared to 41.97% in March. Google, on the other hand, has cause to celebrate because their Android operating system has increased to 53.54% market share for September after posting a 52.14% share in August. It is also worth noting that Android started the year with a 47.45% share of the market which means it has increased steadily for the past nine months.
It would be safe to say that this should all come as no surprise considering the amount of Android devices that are available to consumers the world over vastly outnumbers those devices that are running iOS. As stated earlier, however, this data is important in that it puts into perspective just how misleading the headlines can be sometimes. If anyone was concerned about the ability of the Android platform to rival that of Apple’s one would need to look no further than the cold hard facts presented here by NetMarketShare.