99.6 Percent of New Smartphones Run Android or iOS (theverge.com) 91
The latest smartphone figures from Gartner show how much iOS and Android are dominating the smartphone market. According to the report, Android and iOS accounted for 99.6 percent of all smartphone sales in the fourth quarter of 2016. For comparison, this figure was 96.8 percent in the second quarter of 2015. The Verge reports: Of the 432 million smartphones sold in the last quarter, 352 million ran Android (81.7 percent) and 77 million ran iOS (17.9 percent), but what happened to the other players? Well, in the same quarter, Windows Phone managed to round up 0.3 percent of the market, while BlackBerry was reduced to a rounding error. The once-great firm sold just over 200,000 units, amounting to 0.0 percent market share. It's worth noting that although, in retrospect, this state of affairs seems inescapable, for years analysts were predicting otherwise. Three years ago, Gartner said that Microsoft's mobile OS would overtake iOS for market share in 2017, while BlackBerry would still be hanging around as sizable (if small) player.
Gartner "analysts" (Score:2)
Proves the worth of analysts. Gartner is just a Microsoft shill.
Re:Gartner "analysts" (Score:5, Funny)
It's only February, there is still time for Microsoft to overtake iOS in 2017.
And now: unicorns!
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The true value of Gartner is in giving clueless managers someone to blame for their bad decissions.
Which is why these managers are willing to pay so much for their service.
Re:Gartner "analysts" (Score:4, Interesting)
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To be fair, Gartner most probably had no idea at all about Windows anal probe 10 and M$ shooting itself in the foot and then sticking the bloody stump in it's mouth. You can not be 'cool' and sell into the consumer market with a accessory personal device whilst being seen as control freak perves wanting to control and pry into everyone's personal life. Windows watching you masturbate is not exactly the best way to sell a device that people will carry around with them. So basically smart phone forecast prior
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As much as I'd love for you to be right - MS has behaved like this for 20 years and they're still the dominant desktop OS.
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As much as I'd love for you to be right - MS has behaved like this for 20 years and they're still the dominant desktop OS.
They're the dominant desktop OS simply because of inertia and the large volume of software available. And that's the same reason Windows phones will never be able to break into the two-horse race between iOS and Android. There's no real software available for a Windows phone compared to the other platforms, and nobody in their right mind is going to develop for a platform that accounts for 3/1000ths of the phones out there. Worse yet, when someone has a market share that low you have to wonder who the sc
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games
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M$ is pretty much killing itself in the consumer market and is rapidly reaching the point of no return and perhaps even crossed over.
Windows (all versions): 85% and stable
OS X: 11%
Linux: 1.5%
Misc (possibly mis-ID as desktop): 2.5%
One third of the 85% above is now using Win10. Half the gamers on Steam now run Win10. With Ryzen and Kaby Lake there is no Win7 support. Sorry to disappoint you, but even as people are holding on to Win7 there zero evidence of any migration away. When push comes to shove I imagine most will begrudgingly upgrade like they did with WinXP.
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M$ is pretty much killing itself in the consumer market and is rapidly reaching the point of no return and perhaps even crossed over.
Windows (all versions): 85% and stable
OS X: 11%
Linux: 1.5%
Misc (possibly mis-ID as desktop): 2.5%
Not sure where you got those figures. Linux Desktop Market share [netmarketshare.com] is now at 2.27%. Not huge but definitely increasing.
One third of the 85% above is now using Win10. Half the gamers on Steam now run Win10. With Ryzen and Kaby Lake there is no Win7 support. Sorry to disappoint you, but even as people are holding on to Win7 there zero evidence of any migration away. When push comes to shove I imagine most will begrudgingly upgrade like they did with WinXP.
Again I will refer you to the URL. Windows 10 is approx 25.3% with Windows 7 approximately 47.2% and surprisingly Windows XP at 9.17%. Even Windows 8.1 is at 6.9% so that tells you how popular Windows 10 is, although as people throw away their old windows machines and purchase new ones then Windows 10 market share will increase.
In the motherboard BIOS there is an option for "Other OS" and
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http://gs.statcounter.com/os-m... [statcounter.com]
http://gs.statcounter.com/os-v... [statcounter.com]
http://store.steampowered.com/... [steampowered.com]
As far as PC games go, Microsoft Windows dominates although if you go to Steam and look at the number of games available for Linux and SteamOS there are over 5,000 and some are AAA. Good luck finding the time to play them all.
And yet the trend is backwards towards less Linux users... Linux used to have something like 1% when SteamOS was being hyped, today it's at 0.8%. You keep talking it up, I'm telling you users aren't buying it.
In the motherboard BIOS there is an option for "Other OS" and I initially installed Fedora 24 (now 25) on the Z170 (takes Sky Lake) without any problems so I don't forsee any issues with the motherboards for Ryzen (when it comes out) or Kaby Lake which has the same LGA 1151 socket as Sky lake and will run on Z170, H170, B150 and H110 series motherboards
Well except that AMD has explicitly said there won't be any chipset drivers for Ryzen on Win7. That Kaby Lake is supported is more of an accident because it's so similar to Skylake and even Skylake suppo
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Right now the only thing tying me to Windows is games. When there're a few games that I want to play that don't work on 7 or my new hardware doesn't I'll have to upgrade.
Microsoft are not (that) stupid. They do this crap because they know they have people by the balls. Look at what happens whey they have competition: When the PS4 and XBone were shown Microsoft said theirs was to require online connectivity to play at all ti
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Gartner was probably not the only company taking money for "market analysis" from Microsoft.
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MS had the potential to increase their market share but I think their discarding of many of the positive aspects of WP8.x and failure to embrace Xamarin that primarily contributed to their loss of market share. When I get a new smart phone I'll be migrating from WP8 to Android. WP10 simply doesn't interest me.
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I used a Lumia for well over a year, then switched to Android because of a required app. Yeah, I could keep both, but carry both every day? No, thanks. Honestly? I still miss the Lumia. For me it was much, much better in everyday use, the new one seems like a halfhearted attempt at making a mobile OS. Note: this should be surprising - the new phone is upper-mid range, the Lumia was low-end, plus I absolutely hate Windows 8/10 on desktop. Guess what, on a phone it's actually great, at least for some users, i
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It's almost like Gartner and it's "Magic Quadrant" horseshit are up for the highest bidder.
Oh wait, they always have been.
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I'm assuming you're talking about Gartner's prediction that Windows Phone would overtake iPhone in 2015?
Whilst analysts have a tendency to get very little right, in fairness to Gartner, they probably weren't expecting Microsoft to reboot the platform twice and, in both times, leave all their previous users high and dry on the old OS.
Surprise (Score:2)
Blackberry OS is mostly dead, tizen and so on never really started and other custom OS run on phones which are not called smartphones.
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... who has been failing at smart phones for 15 years. First, to Palm. Then to Blackberry. Now to Apple and Google.
Their products have been horrid for as long as some of their customers have been alive, and they aren't getting better enough to cause people to want to switch from their known ecosystem.
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In other news today...
Re:0.4 of a phone (Score:5, Interesting)
What makes me feel like this is just some bullshit marketng post is, how do you sell 0.4 of a phone, or 0.9 of a phone... All of those "units sold" should be whole numbers.
Erm... they're talking in percentages. When you're talking in the terms of 446 million units, a tenth of a percent is 460,000 units... Which is still significant.
They aren't selling 0.3 of a phone, they are taking 0.3% of the market which means they're selling 1.3 million phones.
What this report emphasises (without trying to say it) is that the windows phone market has been in decline for years. In 2015 I believe they had 2% and at their peak, 4%. What the report also doesn't say (because when they haven't got their tongue up Microsoft's arse, Gartner are vigorously trying to shove it up Apple's arse) is that the smartphone market is really the Android market.
Re:0.4 of a phone (Score:4, Interesting)
Gartner are vigorously trying to shove it up Apple's arse) is that the smartphone market is really the Android market.
That's not really true. From the report, the iOS market is around 22% of the size of the Android market. That's a much higher ratio than the size of the Mac market to the Windows market has ever been. Even that doesn't tell the whole story, because a large part of the Android market is very low-end phones, with razor-thin margins for the manufacturer and very few app sales. This is important to the sort of people reading this kind of report, because they care about what the return on investment will be from supporting a given platform. It doesn't matter that Android completely dominates in the poorer parts of Africa, India, and China to the extent that iOS is a rounding error, it matters what phones the people with money to spend on your product have.
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A better graph tells a thousand words:
http://cdn.bgr.com/2013/03/com... [bgr.com]
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Five years out of date. Even though we know how it continues, that graph does not tell us.
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t doesn't matter that Android completely dominates in the poorer parts of Africa, India, and China
Right, but only up to a point. If you have to travel to Africa and live there for some time, and the local apps (informing of the danger of crocodile infestation, for example) are only developed for Android, then it matters a bit for you that you only have an iOS device (that bit being perhaps the hand lost to a crocodile's bite).
Market share is always important, and one platform tends to push others out, as the cost of developing for more than one platform is always bigger than developing for just one. In
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Errm, are there in fact any local apps that a foreigner in the country would care about? I doubt it, but what do I know.
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Completely agree with you, that Apple dominates the market of shallow prats.
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So how did the Kool-Aid taste?
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Android sells more units but Apple makes almost all of the profits in the smartphone space. In Android presumably Google makes a good profits off ad delivery, and Samsung makes decent profits (used to be higher but never even a fraction of Apples), and the rest of the handset makers break even or lose money.
As a developer I stay on iOS because the revenues are so much higher for iOS apps, still about double the Google play store last I checked. The implication is that most android phones are used as "featur
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What the report also doesn't say ... is that the smartphone market is really the Android market.
Because it isn't true. Android is dominant, but Apple still hangs onto a significant and lucrative portion of it. Not that I will shed a tear when Apple finally goes the way of Blackberry, but I fervently hope that viable forks of Android/Linux are well established by then, otherwise we the world are truly in trouble.
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Worldwide smartphone sales in the fourth quarter of 2016. (Thousands of units.)
(emphasis mine)
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What makes me feel like this is just some bullshit marketng post is, how do you sell 0.4 of a phone, or 0.9 of a phone... All of those "units sold" should be whole numbers.
Fuckin' percentages, how do they work?
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Not sure why this was down-modded, as the parent is completely right!
Perhaps the subject is distasteful, otherwise the content is spot-on.
he tried to be a second rate Google on connectivity
Perhaps you meant, second rate Google on abusing people's privacy and sucking as much of their data as they can get their hand on, and selling it to the highest bidder, like insurance agencies and the gov? ... But then again, Microsoft has always been "second rate" when it comes to copying others, first IBM, and Lotus, then Apple for a very long time, never quite measurin
So MS pays Gartner more than Apple (Score:2)
Gartner's predictions eerily parallel the amount of money vendors pay them yet it never seems to matter to them or their customers that they are so consistently wrong.
Quiet sad. (Score:2)
That means a bunch of old people got duped into buying a cell with Windows Phone. Microsoft should be ashamed of themselves! ;)
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Everyone who feels an urge to be "the best kind of correct" about Android's use of Linux as its kernel makes me appreciate how Stallman got it right about using the term "GNU/Linux" to distinguish it from the completely different Android userland.
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My phone running GNU\Linux is obviously a mythical beast then...
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Which make and model of phone runs GNU/Linux? If it's the one I think you're talking about (Nokia N900), it's probably "a mythical beast" in Slashdot's home country. Can it even connect to modern networks now that AT&T is phasing out GSM service in favor of expanding LTE?
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Which make and model of phone runs GNU/Linux? If it's the one I think you're talking about (Nokia N900), it's probably "a mythical beast" in Slashdot's home country. Can it even connect to modern networks now that AT&T is phasing out GSM service in favor of expanding LTE?
It's a Jolla C running Sailfish OS manufactured last year by Intex (India), its modem is designed for Europe so I guess it won't be that happy in the US of A.
Gartner, enough said (Score:2)
Nobody except Gartner believes most of what they predict anyway. Did anyone really think that Microsofts n-th attempt to make a phone OS would be any more successful than the previous ones?
I'm surprised that Blackberry fell so deep, because it still has a strong foothold in the finance and some other highly security-conscious industries (military, etc.) and some of its security features are still unique.
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Nobody except Gartner believes most of what they predict anyway. Did anyone really think that Microsofts n-th attempt to make a phone OS would be any more successful than the previous ones?
One has to admit the possibility is there. Smartphones have already displaced standalone GPS devices and the majority of consumer cameras. Current smartphones are powerful enough to be most people's computer, TV media frontend, etc. Most personal computers still run Windows. If Microsoft could displace TV set top boxes and computers using a phone-sized device, they could potentially be very successful. Granted, that's a big "if", but it could be done if they got their product development and marketing w
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One has to admit the possibility is there.
Mathematically, yes. Realistically, you would have to be a complete idiot to bet money on it.
The one area that MS consistently fails in, for all its existence, is usability. Everything they make has always been just barely usable. Their interface design is inconsistent, constantly changing and at best tolerable. But for a small screen on a phone, the interface is the king. It is the one thing you have to get right.
The news is to the right of the decimal point... (Score:2)
The news is to the right of the decimal point. We all knew it was 99 point something.
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Back in the days of the BlackBerry Curve, they basically did something close enough to that. Unfortunately, once BlackBerry 10 came around, they totally forgot the importance of having a cheap-low-end even if its not profitable. You basically need those junk devices to build your platform's userbase to the level that people care about it enough to support your better devices.
Microsoft understood this back when they were more seriously pushing the various Windows Phone incarnations. Unfortunately, they fai
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The relaunch of the Nokia 3310 later this year may be interesting for a dumbphone.
Sailfish someone? (Score:2)
The best way to be within the 0.1% ;-)
On top of a Fairphone hardware for instance...
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Smartphone life expectancy? (Score:3)
So if 1.6 billion of the 2.4 billion smart phones in use today were purchased in the past year, does that suggest that on average over half the world's smart phones last under a year?
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So if 1.6 billion of the 2.4 billion smart phones in use today were purchased in the past year, does that suggest that on average over half the world's smart phones last under a year?
Yes.
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Me I keep my phones as long as they work. The last one worked for 3'5 years until the Wifi started working intermittently
Whether you use Android or iOS (Score:2)
...I hope that we can come together and agree that it's sad and hilarious that companies like Gartner exist and consistently make such completely asinine predictions about anything at all.
Every year some analyst predicts something absolutely stupid that all of us know is impossible. I hope whoever made this call knows that they are bad and they should feel bad.
So... (Score:1)