Back in 2010, the smartphone market was pretty fragmented. BlackBerry was still going strong, Symbian was running on millions of Nokia phones and Samsung hadn’t given up on its own operating system, Bada, yet. Windows Phone was not officially dead and the combined market share of Android and iOS amounted to no more than 39 percent.
How things have changed. While the market is still highly competitive in terms of manufacturers battling for the consumers’ affection, the platform war has been definitively decided. We are now looking at a de facto duopoly where Google's Android and Apple's iOS combine for 99.8 percent market share. According to a forecast published by IDC this week, we shouldn’t expect this to change anytime soon. As it seems, there will be two smartphone platforms for the foreseeable future. So we better pick one and get used to it.
This chart shows a forecast of worldwide smartphone shipments and operating system market share.
