RIM (BlackBerry) global smartphone OS market share 2007-2016, by quarter

About This Statistic

This statistic shows the global market share held by RIM's BlackBerry OS for smartphones on a quarterly basis from 2007 to 2016. In the third quarter of 2016, RIM's share of the international smartphone OS market was .1 percent. In 2016, around 1.5 billion smartphones were sold worldwide.

BlackBerry OS – additional information

Canadian company Blackberry, formerly known as RIM, is one of the pioneers in the smartphone industry. The company started developing pager models in the 1990s, and later on ventured into the mobile phone market. The first BlackBerry smartphone, the BlackBerry 957, was released in April 2000, and targeted enterprises. As the Blackberry operating system matured and improved in functionality, the company started to expand its smartphones devices to the consumer market. Despite the introduction of Apple’s iPhone in 2007, RIM’s global operating system market share continued to increase in the next few years. In 2009, the company held about 20 percent of the smartphone OS market share, and was the second largest smartphone operating system in the world, only behind Symbian.

BlackBerry sales reached its peak in the last quarter of 2009. After this, the figures started to drop dramatically, reaching the lowest figure to date in 2016, when the company only accounted for 0.1 percent of the market share. BlackBerry’s decline can be attributed both to the growth of Google’s mobile operating system Android and the success of Apple’s iPhone. Android became a market leader in 2011 already and, as of early 2016, accounted for more than 80 percent of all smartphones sales worldwide, while Apple’s iOS took the second place, with about 15 percent of the market share. The BlackBerry OS has also struggled to compete with Android and iOS in the app market; the store has around 234,500 apps available in contrast to about two million apps both in the Google Play store and the Apple App Store.