Smartphone shipment share worldwide by operating system 2014-2023

Almost all smartphones shipped worldwide in 2018 are using Google’s Android or Apple’s iOS mobile operating systems. Shipments of Android smartphones accounted for 85.1 percent of the global market, with Apple iPhones making up the other 14.9 percent. The market share is not expected to change over the forthcoming years.

Why is Android so dominant?

The Android operating system was initially unveiled in 2007 and is now the adopted system for almost every smartphone vendor other than Apple. It is an open source platform that allows mobile phone manufacturers to add their own look to the operating system.
Symbian and RIM (Research In Motion), mobile operating systems that ran on Nokia and BlackBerry devices respectively, held around 70 percent of the global market sales share in 2009, but could not keep up with the developments of Google Android and Apple iOS.

Smarter than the average phone

Smartphones combine the practicality of mobile phones and personal computers, and annual worldwide sales of smartphones stand today at around 1.56 billion units – sales a decade earlier were just 139 million. The ten-year boom in global smartphone sales is expected to level off over the forthcoming years, but there are interesting developments from within the Chinese market. Four of the top six smartphone vendors are Chinese manufacturers (Huawei, Xiamoi, Oppo, and Vivo) and they continue to increase their share of the global market.