Who Owns the SmartPhone Market? 2008 Market Share by Phone and Operating System

Gartner Research recently released Q4 and 2008 global market share reports for smartphones, both by device and by operating system.  The results might surprise you.  Especially when you see who is and isn’t growing.

WorldWide Device Sales

Highlights:

• RIM Blackberry continues extremely strong growth.
• Nokia is is sharp decline.
• HTC continues to have strong growth

WorldWide Operating System Growth

Highlights:

• Symbian is declining quickly due to pressure from new platforms and the decline of Nokia (which uses the Symbian OS).  Share is down to 47 % from 62% in 2007.
• RIM continues to grow, now at 20% of market vs. 11% in 2007
• Android smartphones are estimated to account for 20% of all Linux OS sales, making the Android OS a relatively small global player.  Linux sales are growing quickly (up 19%) primarily driven by Anroid-based smartphones sold through T-Mobile.
• Microsoft Mobile is growing driven by popularity of the Samsung Omnia and HTC touchscreen products.

So What?

One of the key issues with fragmentation in the smartphone Operating System market is that it creates issues for app developers.  Currently different versions of apps need to be created for each OS - companies aren’t going to hire hundreds of programmers to program each OS.  ZDNET predicts that Android and Windows Mobile are likely to get pushed out of the picture.

That doesn’t mean it’s time to count other platforms out. Andrew Lacy, chief executive of Tapulous, said he expects the Google Android, Palm Pre, Nokia, Windows Mobile and RIM BlackBerry platforms are all likely to see good growth in the coming year as smart phones replace older phones at a fast clip. But Lacy said it will become much tougher to support other programs if it means hiring a couple of hundred programmers to adapt games to run on all of the other platforms. - Venture Beat