Android grabbed an 81 percent share of the world smartphone market during the third quarter.
According to IDC’s latest Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, Google’s mobile OS hit a new high, jumping up from 74.9 percent share a year ago, and saw its shipments rise 51.3 percent annually, to 211.6 million from 139.9 million.
But perhaps the most impressive numbers in IDC’s study was 9.5 million units Windows Phone shipped during the third quarter. That’s small compared to Android and iOS but it represents a huge 156 percent growth annually for the OS.
iOS continued to lose market share, down to 12.9 percent despite shipping 33.8 million iPhones during the third quarter, a 25.6 percent increase over the same quarter of last year. But Apple was outdone in world smartphone market share loss by BlackBerry, whose piece of the pie shrunk to 1.7 percent while its smartphone shipments dropped 41.6 percent annually.
According to IDC, all these numbers come on 261.1 million smartphones total shipped during the quarter.
