Towering above BlackBerry, Android now makes up to 75 percent of the smartphone market share, according to the new Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker statistics.
The study by the International Data Corportation (IDC) found that every three out of four smartphone shipments belonged to Android, reaching 136 million in total count during the third quarter of 2012, indicating a 91.5 percent yearly growth against the half count of 46.4 percent in overall market growth.
In contrast, BlackBerry has faced continual decline on market value scales.
“Android has been one of the primary growth engines of the smartphone market since it was launched in 2008,” said research manager of mobile phones at IDC Ramon Llamas, reported the ITWeb.
“In every year since then, Android has effectively outpaced the market and taken market share from the competition. In addition, the combination of smartphone vendors, mobile operators, and end-users who have embraced Android has driven shipment volumes higher. Even today, more vendors are introducing their first Android-powered smartphones to market,” he explained.
Android hit a new record level within only three months, according to the IDC study. The recently released figures were higher than the 2007 one, the year Android made its debut. Samsung was the leader among vendors in this area but experienced a decrease in market shares as various smaller retailers pushed up their manufacturing.
Coming in at far-off second in the contesting statistics, iOS was the only other mobile operating system to have more than 10 percent in the quarterly market share slices.
It was the untimely launch of iPhone5 — in terms of counting for the quarterly statistics — suggesting a lack of new features like previous years that caused this lagging behind, the hope was rather on the larger screen and LTE connectivity to boost the numbers, the IDC said.
BlackBerry’s blow had been dealt rather hard with a progressive declination, spiralling down to only 4 percent. Fingers are crossed for a boost with the release of BlackBerry 10 next year, while the BlackBerry 7 is trusted to keep them floating meanwhile.
However, the IDC said the BlackBerry is still high in demand with its “wildly popular BBM service within multiple key markets worldwide”.
The confidence is also esteemed by a growing subscriber crowd.
Symbian operating systems experienced a similar shrink of market value. Among these are Nokia, still the bigger retailer of its kind, as well as Japanese brands Sharp, Sony and Fujitsu. The IDC predicts that Symbian shipping will cease within the next year.
Just below the Symbian’s numbers, lies Windows Phone with 3.6 million shipped units to celebrate its second anniversary. With the release of Windows Phone 8 smartphones in the fourth quarter, it is quite possible that they could climb closer to the market-dominating Android or at least confer with iOS.
Linux has dipped in demand for the third quarter in the row, also amounting to a decreased number in yearly growth. Samsung has made up for the biggest slice of shipments in this category. Firefox, Sailfish and Tizen are however planning future Linux releases.
The remaining operating systems do not even make up for a decimal percentage in overall market value.
