This almost goes without saying, however Android and iOS are the dominate players in the smartphone market these days. What may be a bit more interesting though, is just how much of a dominance these two have when combined. Details coming by way of a recent IDC report are showing a number of 91.1 percent for the fourth quarter of 2012.
That doesn’t seem to leave much room for everyone else. Stepping back from Q4 and looking at 2012 as a whole and that number is only slightly less — 87.6 percent when Android and iOS are combined. Looking at units shipped instead of percentages and we are still seeing some big numbers. According to this same IDC report, Android vendors and Apple shipped a total of 207.6 million smartphones during Q4 2012.
That 207.6 million number is up 70.2 percent as compared to the 122.0 million that were shipped during the same quarter in the previous year. Ramon Llamas, research manager with IDC’s Mobile Phone team has said that “the dominance of Android and Apple reached a new watermark in the fourth quarter.” And really, with a combined percentage now greater than 90 percent what else can be said.
Touching on Android for a moment and we go back to Samsung being dominant. It was noted that Samsung accounted for 42 percent of Android smartphone shipments during 2012 and that following them was “a long list of vendors with single digit market share, and an even longer list of vendors with market share less than one percent.” Of course, aside from Android and iOS we still see Windows Phone and BlackBerry fighting it out for the remaining part of the pie.
[via Business Wire]
