“The latest data from Strategy Analytics reveals that 70.1 percent of smartphones shipped in the fourth quarter of 2012 were Android devices, while 22 percent were iPhones,” AppleInsider reports. “With the two platforms accounting for 92.1 percent of shipments, that left just 7.9 percent for all other operating systems, such as Windows Phone or BlackBerry.”
“‘Combined together, Apple and Android accounted for a record 92 percent share of all smartphones shipped globally in the fourth quarter of 2012,’ said Scott Bicheno, senior analyst at Strategy Analytics. ‘The worldwide smartphone industry has effectively become a duopoly as consumer demand has polarized around mass-market Android models and premium Apple designs,'” AppleInsider reports. “The research firm’s data found that although Apple saw its sales grow 29 percent year over year, its market share was down slightly, from 24 percent a year ago to 22 percent in the fourth quarter of 2012.”
Read more in the full article here.
This headline is equal to … Hyundai and Ferrari take 92% of the car market. Pointless.
Yup.
Very lousy article. If it’s from a market share perspective, just mention Android will be the honest way of using the word “dominate”. No need to say the combined figure with iOS. Although, market share in this context speaks of little value in terms of great HCI and user-experience the well-evolved human mind would prefer.
Mind you, these are “units shipped”. With Samsung, that does not equal “units sold” at all…..
The question is how many of these are “units stuffed into the sales channel and stuck there”.
Samsung doesn’t even give figures for units shipped. They give private guidance to selected analysts and each analyst comes up with different figures based on what they have been told and how they choose to interpret it.
There’s far too much smoke and mirrors involved with Samsung’s sales figures and I reckon that when the truth finally emerges, it will be rather different to what is being claimed these days.
The issue here is not even “shipped” thing, but the fact that Samsung replaces OS in their featurephones and calls these “smartphones” (yes, $100) right away.
So it will be easy for Samsung to convert almost any number of their 110 million phones to “smartphones”.
Thus it would be more honest to compare growth of phone sales, rather than “smartphone” sales: Apple had 40% unit growth, while Samsung had 12.5%.
Right on. When Amazon as well as many Chinese manufacturers strip all the Google out of Android, it’s not really “Googles” Android anymore.
If they included all the phones that Google claims along with Samsung, the headline would read “ANDROID DOMINATES WITH 112% OF THE SMARTPHONE SHARE.” All the rest don’t even add up to a rounding error.
68% samsung 22%apple. Thats a figure i love seeing.
The latest news sez Android pays a bigger commission to store clerks. Maybe full disclosure at time of sale is now necessary.
No one can deny it’s a two horse race now.
m.cnet.com/news/apple-features-worth-up-to-$100-to-samsung-buyers-witness-says/57491378
How do you reconcile these numbers with those that show more iPhones sold in the December quarter than Android phones?