The latest report on the manufacturer and operating system markets is now coming in from Gartner. The report focuses on the Worldwide figures for both operating systems and manufacturers for the third quarter of 2015. In terms of the numbers, Android’s Q3 market share for 2015 came in at 84.7-percent. When compared to the same quarter for last year, this marked an increase of 1.4-percent, moving up from the 2014 total of 83.3-percent. Interestingly, iOS also saw positive momentum year-over-year. In the third quarter of 2014, iOS occupied a Worldwide market share of 12.5-percent. The latest figures show that has also increased in the third quarter of this year by 0.6-percent, making a current total of 13.1-percent. Of course, with both Android and iOS seeing gains year-on-year, that inevitably does mean that other platforms saw their share decrease. In terms of BlackBerry, their market share dropped down from the 0.8-percent level in 2014 to only a 0.3-percent level for the third quarter of 2015. Likewise, the ‘Others’ category also saw a decrease down from the third quarter 2014 total of 0.4-percent to their current 2015 total of 0.3-percent.
Most worryingly though is the Windows platform. According to the latest data, although, they remained the third platform and ahead of BlackBerry, their total dropped significantly in comparison. In the third quarter of 2014, Windows occupied a 3-percent market share. In contrast, their third quarter 2015 results indicate that share has now died down to only 1.7-percent.
Moving to the manufacturer side of things and in terms of Worldwide smartphone sales for the third quarter, Samsung continue to top the leaderboard. That said, the figures do suggest that year-over-year for the third quarter they did see a slight decline by 0.2-percent with their new total coming in at the 23.7-percent marker. As already noted, Apple saw a year-over-year increase by 0.6-percent with their third quarter total moving up to 13.1-percent. Huawei did well in Q3 with their total market share of sales rising from 5.2-percent up to 7.7-percent year-on-year. While Lenovo and Xiaomi both saw declines for the same period comparisons. In Lenovo’s case, the decline was more significant with their market share for the third quarter dropping down from 7-percent to 4.9-percent, essentially, the difference moving to Huawei. For Xiaomi, the decline was far less substantial with their total dropping from 5.2-percent to the current total of 4.9-percent. That said, the good news overall is that the market share of smartphones in general seems to have grown year-on-year by as much as 15.5-percent, with Gartner reporting that the total number of Global smartphones sold in the third quarter of 2015 came close to 353 million, up from 305 million the year before.
