The latest data from Strategic Analytics shows that Android has a slight decline in the global smartphone market share, but is still the king. In the third quarter of year 2014, Google’s Android has the share of 84% among the smartphones which were shipped golbally, which is 1% less than the previous quarter. Followed by Apple’s iOS having 12% of the market share, Microsoft’s Windows has 3%, and BlackBerry holds the least, which is 1%.
Though there is a small drop in the market share of Android in the smartphone market, Google has no worries at all, since the share of forked version of smartphones considerably decreased. Forked version in this third quarter held 37% of all Android phones, which was 39% in the previous quarter. In case you don’t know, forked Android is that which don’t have any Google services such as Google Play Store, Maps, Search or YouTube. This means more people are now using the services by Google in their smartphones, and since Google’s revenue is ad-based, the less forked versions the more is the profit for the company. The overall shipments of total number of smartphones are also in an increasing phase, and according to the analytics, it is expected to grow 12% further next year.
And as of the smartphone manufacturers, though Samsung is still at the lead worldwide, its share is fairly decreased, which is now 25%. This is way too low compared to the same time period of previous year (which was 35% then). The increasing sale of Xiaomi and other similar brands which offer good quality smartphones in a competitive price is obviously the reason for this. Samsung has been a dominant Android smartphone manufacturer for a long time, but it seems that it has to change its policy soon (the main of which is by reducing the prices, and thus the profit margin).
