Analyst firm IDC has released their Smartphone OS Market Share report for the first quarter of 2017 and its all looking good for Android. The report looks at smartphone unit shipments to base the figures and Android for the quarter was on 85% of all units shipped. That’s up from the 81.4% of the previous quarter (Q4 2016) but still 2.6% below the high water mark of 87.6% in Q2 2016.
The gains for Android came at the expense of Apple’s iOS. Unit shipments for iPhones dropped to 14.7%, down some 3.5% from Q4 2016, which happened to be the height of its shipments at 18.2%. The only other mobile platform that was mentioned was Windows Phone in the report. That all-but dead platform now accounts for .1% of smartphone units sold.
While the numbers in the IDC report are positive for Android, it isn’t really much of a game changing report. Android’s
IDC Global Smartphone OS Market Share – Q1 2017
marketshare has been between 81% to 88% for the last 5 quarters consecutively with iOS always a distant second place. It reaffirms that Android, with its open architecture and platform, is winning the longer game when it comes to dominating the mobile OS market. These trends are not likely to shift much over the course of the next year or two but IDC does expect that the average cost of an Android device to slip below the $200 mark by 2021.
You can read the full report on the IDC site.
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