Gartner says Android to dominate smartphone market

Anthony Caruana
Saturday, 11 September 2010 14:29

Your IT - Mobility

New research and forecasting from Gartner suggests that Android will become the dominant mobile operating system in the near future. And while total unit sales will grow for all the players in this increasingly competitive market, Android will move from newcomer to leader in just five years.

A Gartner report authored by Roberta Cozza, principal research analyst at Gartner, forecasts that the total smartphone market will grow from almost 270 million units by the end of this year to about 876 million units - that's almost a year on year doubling of the market. At the same time all the major players, Symbian, Android, RIM, Apple and Microsoft will see strong sales growth in terms of numbers of units shipped.

But when we look at the market share picture, Gartner's report paints a different picture. At the end of 2009, Symbian held a 46.9% share of the smartphone market - not bad seeing that Steve Jobs failed to even mention Symbian at the World Wide Developer Conference earlier this year. However, that share will fall  to about 40% this year and is forecast to be 30.2% by the end of 2014. Given that mobile data tripled last year that's a massive fall in a growing market.

Over the same period from this year to 2014, RIM's share is expected to fall from almost 20% to around 12% and Windows Phone will crumble from a fragile 8.7% to 3.9%. However, the big unknown with Windows Phone is the impact of Windows Phone 7. That newly refreshed OS, that's been built from the ground up, may cause some distortion to Gartner's stats if it's successful. Interestingly, Gartner's report says that 'Windows Phone will be relegated to sixth place behind MeeGo in Gartner's worldwide OS ranking by 2014'. That's right - the report puts Microsoft behind someone practically no-one has every heard of!

An interesting element to Gartner's research is what happens to iOS during the 2010 - 2014 period. By the end of this year, Gartner forecasts the iOS market share to be 15.4%, rising to 17.1% by the end of next year. However, three years into the future, by the end of 2014 Gartner forecasts the share to drop to under 15%.