Google Android Marches Towards Smartphone Platform Dominance
By Anna Johnson on February 28th, 2011Independent studies by Gartner and comScore may differ on which smartphone devices and operating systems lead the pack, but they both agree on which smartphone operating system is headed towards market dominance: Google’s Android operating system.
According to Gartner, sales of the Android operating system (OS) grew by 888 percent in 2010, with Android becoming the second most popular smartphone OS by the end of the year. Similarly, comScore estimates that Android’s market share grew by 7.3 percent between Q3 and Q4 of 2010, with Android attaining the second largest share of the smartphone market.
While Gartner reckons Symbian has the leading smartphone operating system, followed by Android and then Apple iOS, comScore reckons the top five are as follows:
- RIM (BlackBerry): 31.6 percent market share
- Google Android: 28.7 percent
- Apple iOS: 25.0 percent
- Microsoft: 8.4 percent
- Palm: 3.7 percent.
According to Gartner, smartphone device sales to U.S. consumers grew by 72.1 percent between 2009 and 2010, accounting for 19 percent of total mobile communications device sales in 2010. In the fourth quarter, smartphones accounted for 22.2 percent of the quarter’s 452 million mobile device sales. Worldwide, mobile device sales to consumers totaled 1.6 billion units in 2010, a 31.8 percent increase from 2009.
For its part, comScore estimates that 63.2 million people in the U.S. owned smartphones during the three months ending in December 2010, up 60 percent versus year ago.
It seems Gartner and comScore differ on their definition of a ‘smartphone’, with Gartner interpreting the term to include more kinds of devices. Nonetheless, on either definition, Android is clearly the winning OS.
