Android was on over two-thirds of smartphones shipped in the second quarter, with Apple’s iOS on around a sixth of them — more than all the remaining smartphone OSes combined, IDC said Wednesday. Windows Phone’s share of the market continues to grow, although it remains far behind the front runners.
IDC estimated that of the 154 million smartphones shipped during the second quarter, 104.8 million, or 68.1 percent, ran Android, and 26 million (16.9 percent) ran iOS. A year earlier, IDC estimated shipments at 108.3 million, of which 46.9 percent ran Android and 18.8 percent iOS.
The growth in shipments of iOS, at 27.5 percent year on year, was not enough to keep pace with overall market growth of 42.2 percent, IDC said.
Samsung shipped more Android smartphones than the next seven Android vendors combined — and, with 46 million Android phones, also handily outshipped Apple.
BlackBerry OS was the next most popular smartphone platform, with shipments of 7.4 million (4.8 percent market share), down from 12.5 million (11.5 percent) a year earlier, while shipments of Symbian phones slipped to 6.8 million (4.4 percent) from 18.3 million (16.9 percent). Research In Motion’s decision to delay release of phones running the next generation of BlackBerry OS will not help its chances of recovery, IDC said.
The number of phones shipped with Windows Phone 7 or Windows Mobile climbed to 5.4 million (3.5 percent), up from 2.5 million (2.3 percent) a year earlier, mostly due to the arrival of Nokia’s Lumia phones, shipments of which almost doubled between the first and second quarters.
Despite Nokia’s support, shipments of Windows Phone devices are still behind those of Symbian, the OS that Nokia ditched for it. Symbian’s decline, though, is accelerating — second-quarter shipments dropped 62.9 percent year on year — as even developing markets such as China, Central and Eastern Europe, and Africa reject the orphaned OS.
Shipments of Linux phones — predominantly running Samsung’s Bada OS — crept up to 3.5 million from 3.3 million a year earlier, but Linux’s share of the booming smartphone market slipped to 2.3 percent from 3 percent a year earlier.
The concentration on Android and iOS left other options by the wayside: shipments of the “other” category in IDC’s figures fell to 100,000, or 0.1 percent of the market, from 600,000 and 0.5 percent a year earlier.
Peter Sayer covers open source software, European intellectual property legislation and general technology breaking news for IDG News Service. Send comments and news tips to Peter at peter_sayer@idg.com.