Android rose to above 84.7% in smartphone market in Q2, 2014

According to latest stats published by the International Data Corporation (IDC), Android is the most dominant mobile OS in the market for the second quarter of 2014. Android currently holds about 84.7% market share, ahead of its biggest competitor, Apple’s iOS.

iOS and Android combined account for about 96% of global market share. The rest of the 4% is divided amongst Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform, BlackBerry and few others(including FirefoxOS, Ubuntu etc). Noted research firm IDC had this to say,

The dominant smartphone operating systems (OS), Android and iOS, saw their combined market share swell to 96.4% for the quarter, leaving little space for competitors. Android was the primary driver with its vendor partners shipping a total of 255.3 million Android-based smartphones in 2Q14, up 33.3% year over year. Meanwhile, iOS saw its market share decline despite posting 12.7% year-over-year shipment growth. While Android and iOS both realized gains from a year ago, the rest of the market recorded losses.

It means that, despite the record breaking sales of iPhones, Apple is still struggling to keep it’s stake of the market share. Even more interesting, it is losing ground to low cost Android smartphones, not just high end Androids as we may have expected. In total, Android has shipped 255.3 million devices in Q2 of 2014 whereas Apple managed to ship only 35.2 million units. Comparing the Q2 stats of Apple from last year, Apple saw a decrease of 13% in its sales.

Speaking of the low cost Android smartphones, out of 84.7% of the total Android smartphones that were shipped worldwide in Q2, 58.6% of those phones cost less than $200 with no contract. On the other hand, Apple only has 15.4% of its shipment in the range of $200 to $400. In response to growing perception that Apple was a luxury product, only available to those most privileged among us; Apple introduce the iPhone 5C, a cheaper version of iPhone 5, in order to tackle the lower end market.  It was a smart move by Apple but it didn’t do well in the market. It looks like Apple’s management hierarchy should plan on bringing something for the lower end market that could compete with Android at that level.

Lastly, Windows Phone did see a fall in its market share compared to last year, but it did slightly better compared to Q1, 2014. The main reason for that being because Microsoft bought Nokia and thus, people put more faith in Microsoft Lumia devices than before. In a nutshell, Android is seemingly dominating the market in all three bracket – low end, mid range and high end.