Gartner’s smartphone report for the fourth quarter of 2016 is finally out and Windows Phone and BlackBerry are all but non-existent on the world mobile market share chart. It shouldn’t be a surprise that Android and iOS have owned the world stage when it comes to market share on mobile devices but in the fourth quarter combined for nearly all smartphone sales — 99.6%. Windows accounted for a mere 0.3%, selling just over 1 million units — a drop of 0.8% or roughly 3.2 million units over 4Q15, while BlackBerry only managed a paltry 207,900 sales and actually sit at 0.0% market share.
In 2016 overall, Android also grew its market share by 3.2 percentage points to reach an 84.8 percent share, and was the only OS to grow market share year on year. “The entry of Google’s Pixel phone has made the premium Android smartphone offering more competitive, while the re-entry of HMD (Nokia) in the basic (midtier) smartphone category, is set to further increase the competition in emerging markets,” said Anshul Gupta, research director at Gartner.
Samsung retained their top dog spot for worldwide smartphone sales for the year, selling nearly 306.5 million units, but their market share dropped from 22.5% to 20.5%. Apple also dropped slightly with 14.4% of sales for the year compared to 15.9% in 2015. The big winners? Huawei, Oppo, and BBK combined increased sales by 7.3% for 2016 over 2015 and accounted for 21.3% of total smartphone sales sold during the fourth quarter.
Other notable news sees Apple actually outselling Samsung in the fourth quarter by 0.1% (77 million units to 76.7 million units) over Samsung. Apple hasn’t been in the top spot for quarterly sales since the fourth quarter of 2014. There’s no doubt that the Note7 recall contributed in part to the drop in Samsung’s sales as some users chose to replace their Note7s with other Android devices, or switched over to Apple.
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[button link=”http://www.gartner.com/newsroom/id/3609817″ icon=”fa-external-link” side=”left” target=”blank” color=”285b5e” textcolor=”ffffff”]Source: Gartner[/button]
