IDC’s overall 2016 smartphone market guesstimate has Android at 85 percent share

It’s not even December yet, but the first estimated full-year smartphone market report is already out, previewing an overall global growth of 0.6 percent in shipment numbers compared to the whole of 2015.

That’s worryingly down from last year’s 10.4 percent surge, but at least sales aren’t on a decline… yet. The International Data Corporation (IDC) doesn’t break down the projected 1.45 billion units tally for 2016 into manufacturer share, focusing once again on Android’s increasing domination of the mobile operating system landscape.

No less than 1.22 billion of all smartphones sold worldwide this year are expected to run some form of Google’s open-source platform, equating to a colossal 85 percent slice of the 4G-first pie. Yes, LTE-enabled device adoption is also on the rise, from 61 to 77 percent in so-called emerging markets, and from 85 to 94 (!!!) percent as far as “mature” countries are concerned, including USA, Canada, Japan, and Western Europe territories.

Meanwhile, “all signs point to 2016 being the first full year of declining shipments for Apple’s iPhone”, though IDC is quick to underline this by no means foretells doomsday for iOS, which retains a solid 14.3 percent market share, tipped to remain largely unchanged through 2020.

By then, Windows Phone and “other” platforms are forecasted to effectively fade away, plummeting from 6.1 and 4.5 million units respectively shipped in total this year to no more than a mil each.

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from Pocketnow http://pocketnow.com/2016/11/30/smartphone-shipment-numbers-2016-android