Gartner: Android Now Over 50 Percent Of Smartphone Sales, The Rest Decline

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Android may have some shortcomings, but Google (NSDQ: GOOG) has made enormous advances with manufacturers in terms of getting its OS on their smartphones, and in subsequently getting consumers to buy them. According to figures out today from Gartner, more than 50 percent of all smartphones bought by consumers in Q3 were built on the Android OS. That growth has been at all other platforms’ expense: the figures indicate that every other smartphone platform has declined in marketshare over a year ago.

Android’s current share of 52 percent is a big gain on last year when it only had 25.3 percent of sales. But as you can see from the table below, Android’s gains are outstripping the growth of the overall smartphone market, which is up by 42 percent to total sales of 115 million units.

That’s not the case for another big handset maker, Apple: Although iOS grew in actual unit terms by some four million devices, Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) has actually lost market share to Android overall. It accounted for 15 percent of handset sales compared to 16.6 percent in Q3 2010. RIM (NSDQ: RIMM) saw a similar decline but on a smaller scale, its sales grew by 200,000 devices but it still lost about four percent of its market share in sales.
Gartner includes Samsung’s feature phone OS, bada, in its smartphone category (a sign of things to come from Samsung, perhaps?). It was the only other OS besides Android in the rankings that saw a gain in market share, up to 2.2 percent from its previous share of 1.1 percent, as sales more than doubled to 2.5 million units in the quarter.
Meanwhile, Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT), Symbian and “others” (covering webOS) all declined both in sales and market share.
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