Market share of mobile operating systems worldwide 2012-2021

Android maintained its position as the leading mobile operating system worldwide in June 2021, controlling the mobile OS market with a close to 73 percent share. Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS jointly possess over 99 percent of the global market share.

The leading mobile operating systems

Both unveiled in 2007, Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS have advanced their software over the years and provide regular updates to their operating systems. Google previously named its Android versions after sweet and candy items – their ninth operating system was called Pie and used by more than 31 percent of Android mobile users worldwide. However, in a break from tradition, Google’s latest release is simply called Android 10. In September 2019, Apple released the twelfth version of its operating system (iOS 12) and it was running on 88 percent of Apple mobile devices as of August 2019. In the fall of 2019, Apple released iOS 13 along with iPadOS – a new mobile operating system developed specifically for iPads, and as of June 2020 it was used on 81 percent of all Apple devices.

The rise of the smartphone

From around 2010, the touchscreen smartphone revolution had a major impact on sales of basic feature phones, as the sales of smartphones increased from 139 million units in 2008 to 1.54 billion units in 2019. In 2020, smartphone sales decreased to 1.38 billion units due to the coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic. Apple, Samsung, and lately also Xiaomi, were the big winners in this shift towards smartphones; BlackBerry and Nokia were among the losers. Nokia’s focus on hardware rather than software specifications is one reason their net sales fell by around 30 billion euros in just three years.