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Reputable research firm Gartner today released figures for mobile operating system sales on a global scale in the fourth quarter of 2011. They found that Google suffered a slight decline in market share while Apple gained 8% thanks to the launch of the iPhone 4S. Even with the decline, Google still owned 50.9% of the share for that period, an increase from 30.5% in the same quarter a year ago.
Symbian is quickly losing ground as Nokia has abandoned the dated operating system for Android. Once a worldwide powerhouse, Symbian was only accountable for 11.7% of the sales. RIM came next at 8.8% and Microsoft actually did worse than Samsung’s bada with 1.9% compared to 2.1%.
Gartner credits Samsung as being the driving force for Android’s continued dominance thanks to devices such as the Samsung Galaxy S II and all its variants. Samsung sold 92.68 million devices that quarter, accounting for 19
Apple only had 7.4% of the share on 35 million units sold. LG continues to struggle in the smartphone world as they declined to 3.6% of the share, even being beat by up-and-comer ZTE. Gartner was also nice enough to count up the yearly numbers for us in the chart below.
Android inches ever close to being the leader in overall smartphone market share (installed user-base instead of quarterly and yearly sales) and we’re glad to see that its momentum has sustained even up against Apple’s late surge in 2011. Read the full press release at the source link for the full slate of figures. [Gartner]
