According to industry research firm IDC, the combined worldwide market for smartphones is ruled by two dominant players, namely Google’s Android and Apple’s iPhone iOS. Both have a total of 85 percent market share while the rest – RIM’s BlackBerry, Microsoft Windows Phone, Nokia’s Symbian OS and others – splits the remaining 15 percent.
Android has the largest percentage of the smartphone pie at 68.1 percent. However, this is shared by different companies such as Samsung, HTC, Motorola, and Sony among others, which ride on the Android OS platform for their mobile phone devices. But for the iPhone iOS, the large 16.9 percent market share is occupied by Apple alone.
As for the BlackBerry, Windows Phone, and former market leader Nokia, their current share marks at less than 5 percent each.
The list below is IDC’s figures for worldwide smartphone unit sales and market share in the second quarter of 2012, by operating system:
Android (Google) — 104.8 million units, 68.1 percent share
iOS (Apple ‘s iPhone) — 26.0 million units, 16.9 percent share
BlackBerry (Research in Motion) — 7.4 million units, 4.8 percent share
Symbian (Nokia) — 6.8 million units, 4.4 percent share
Windows (Microsoft ) — 5.4 million units, 3.5 percent share
Source: IDC
