Android takes over 80 percent of smartphone market

The latest data released by the IT industry research organisation IDC gives Google's smartphone operating system Android over 80 percent of the market. To be exact, according to IDC, Android now has 81.3 percent of the world-wide smartphone market.

Apple's iPhone share has fallen slightly compared to 2013 down to 14.8 percent with 192.7 million units sold. Basically Apple sells one iPhone for about every five Android phones.

In third place these days is Microsoft's Windows Phone operating system. According to IDC there were 34.9 million Windows Phone-based smartphones sold in 2014. This in only a fifth of Apple's count. On the upside this is better than 2013 when 33.5 million units were sold.

The expert forecasters expect Android's share to increase again in 2015, and for Apple's share to fall a bit further but probably only slightly—by about 1 to 1.5 percent.

The big question, after Microsoft has invested so much into it, is what is going to happen to the Windows Phone operating system. 2015 could be a do-or-die year for Microsoft's phone operating system.

This post uses information from Paul Thurrott's site. To see Paul's full post about smartphone sales and his insightful analytics click on the coffee mug.

Barry.