News by: Jared Peters 15th Feb 2014
Top Five Smartphone Operating Systems, Shipments, and Market Share, 4Q 2013 (Units in Millions)
Top Five Smartphone Operating Systems, Shipments, and Market Share, 4Q 2013 (Units in Millions)
Operating System
|
4Q13 Shipment Volumes
|
4Q13 Market Share
|
4Q12 Shipment Volumes
|
4Q12 Market Share
|
Year-Over-Year Change
|
| Android |
226.1
|
78.1%
|
161.1
|
70.3%
|
40.3%
|
| iOS |
51.0
|
17.6%
|
47.8
|
20.9%
|
6.7%
|
| Windows Phone |
8.8
|
3.0%
|
6.0
|
2.6%
|
46.7%
|
| BlackBerry |
1.7
|
0.6%
|
7.4
|
3.2%
|
-77.0%
|
| Others |
2.0
|
0.7%
|
6.7
|
2.9%
|
-70.1%
|
| Total |
289.6
|
100.0%
|
229.0
|
100.0%
|
26.5%
|
The smartphone market passed an important milestone in 2013 when worldwide shipments surpassed the 1 billion mark for the first time, driven by continued momentum from Android and iOS.IDC’s latest numbers are in, and 2013 was a pretty big year for smartphones. For the first time ever, smartphone shipments passed 1 billion total phones, which is an incredible achievement. Android smartphones accounted for just shy of 800 million devices. Android and iOS were (obviously) the two major forces behind driving this growth, as both operating systems accounted for 93.8% of smartphone shipments total last year.
For the fourth quarter, we saw some pretty positive growth, too. Android shipments grew 40.3% year-over year, second only to Windows Phone. However, in terms of pure numbers, Android shipping an incredible 226.1 million devices compared to Windows Phone’s 8.8 million. iOS actually saw some pretty slow growth year-over-year, coming in at around 6.7%.
As far as manufacturers are concerned, Samsung is still by and large the top dog in the Android ecosystem, shipping almost 40% of all Android devices in 2013. There’s plenty of manufacturers in the second place spot, but none of are anywhere close to Samsung’s numbers. Not yet, anyway.
The growths last year were huge, but everything else has stayed pretty predictable. Samsung’s still at the top, Samsung and Apple ship more phones than everyone else combined, and BlackBerry is slowly falling off the charts. It’ll be interesting to see how these numbers change when smartphone growth inevitably slows down in the next few years.
