Android loses 8% of its global OS market share in five years

I’m not surprised. I used Android devoutly, had a Galaxy S4, then an S8 when that started showing its age. I upgraded to an iPhone 12 when AT&T ran the promotion to get a free one.

I wanted to keep liking Android. The amount of time I spent arguing vehemently that Android was superior made the switch hard, but several factors came into play for me: - Extremely slow and fragmented upgrade of OS. This resulted in substantially older features and security patches. - Privacy. iMessage’s encryption (though I stand by that it is gimmicky to only offer for iPhones, and I despise that) has a serious network effect. Apple is also far more transparent in what data they use, how they use it, etc. - Ironically, price. At the time, the iPhone was cheaper than the equivalent Android phone.

The big downside is slower upgrades to the latest hardware features. Specifically, I am envious of the people who have 120 FPS phones, they’re beautiful. There is also a loss of customization, but truthfully I thought I’d miss it much more than I did. The fact that the iPhone “just works” is worth it to me.

It's been mentioned before in other articles, but I don't think it can be understated how much iMessage makes it difficult to be the "odd man out" if you're on an Android phone. And it's not just about teenagers, and it's not about "green bubbles".

I recently went on a vacation with friends, 4 other folks on iPhones and me on an Android. Our group chat experience almost made me consider getting an iPhone. The inability to do emoji responds, and the fact that shared videos always looked like shit on my phone were just 2 of the examples. And I'm well past middle age! I can imagine what it feels like to be a high schooler or young adult feeling like the reason the group chat experience is sucking is because "you're the one with the Android".

I was so committed to android since my very first smartphone. I liked that it was a more open platform and that it was a bit more of a tinkerer's phone. I recently got an iPhone SE for just too good of a price and thought, "why not". The moment I started to really use the phone, I felt like a complete fool. Android was always a buggy, stuttery mess. Apple is miles ahead. The phone and OS is incredibly polished. everything fades into the background and it just works in a pleasant and perfect way. Android

The manufacturers of flagship Android devices are a major cause of this.

I love being able to put an SD card in my phone to get a bit of extra storage, without paying Samsung the extra $200 to double the provided storage. In the S6 era, they removed the SD card, only for it to return (briefly) with the S7. Since the S20, it has once again been removed.

I will keep my S10 until it dies, but there is no point me 'upgrading' to a new phone that looses the headphone jack, and removes the SD slot.

I'm looking at the Sony Xperia 1 iii as a possible new phone, but it's a toss up between that and an iPhone.

Phone support is another issue. Three years, and your device will no longer receive Android updates. Apple is much better in this regard.

I used to update my phone every two years, religiously. Phones are now fast enough that it simply is not required. What do I get if I upgrade to the S22? 120hz refresh, a little better 3D graphics? I don't really game on my phone, so these things are not important to me.

Samsung's desire to just copy Apple means it's probably better to just go get the device they are copying.

I used to be so into specs and customizing my phone until I got an iPhone. I had thought I'm going to feel like a caveman using some phone made for dummys, but honestly the phone just works. At the end of the day why was I installing all those custom apps? The stock experience was kind of shit, and you shouldn't need to overclock your mobile phone to get less laggy UI lol.

The iPhone just does the stuff you'd expect a phone to do kinda well out of the box- messages, email, facetime is cool, and camera. You install apps, they all look nice for the most part and work well enough.

On the flip side each time I use my samsung android tablet I'm overwhelmed by all these new settings (none of which I think I use?) and options.

> Android’s loss of market share boils down to heightened competition within the OS space

Yeah, that duopoly is a lot of competition

At least in the USA, you have mainly three choices for "$500+ phones": Pixel, Samsung, and iPhone. The iPhone has been priced very competitively in recent years to the point that they are better hardware at cheap price points than Samsung. That has taken a large chunk of Android sales as people upgrade to iPhones instead of paying more for Samsung.

A thought: It seems that as people get richer around the world they move away from $200 Androids to what is more perceived as luxury: iPhones.

I'm very long time android user (since original galaxy s). Bought my first iPhone this year (13 pro max), and have 0 regrets. It just works. Great screen, great camera, I still use most of Google apps on it: maps, calendar, mail, assistant

I lost my drive to tinker with os/apps long time ago, so the fact that everything is quite friction less makes me happy.

On Android I constantly had issues with lastpass, dji asks you to download apk to fly drone etc.

Is it really that surprising?

Android is becoming just as locked down as Apple, but the ones doing the locking down (samsung) are nowhere near as good at software and attention-to-detail as Apple.

That coupled with android phones having unacceptably sparse security updates (6 months/1 year between security updates? Really?), and higher costs (Apple phones over 7+ years are much cheaper than equivalent samsung over 3 years or less).

If I accept that "my" phone is not something I can't control or fix, why wouldn't I buy the cheaper, better-designed phone with better security? Did they really thing that people wouldn't notice?

Google and samsung decided to give up the only competitive they had (openness, standards) by pretending to be Apple. Now they'll have to compete with Apple on everything else (they can't).

What I find quite interesting amongst my colleagues is that they are deeply invested/locked into either the Google ecosystem or the Apple ecosystem. I know zero people who have recent experience of using both iOS and Android - they’re either in one camp or the other, and have only superficial knowledge of what it’s like to use the other. It feels like two parallel universes running side by side, just out of reach of each other.

I've been heavily considering getting an iPhone because of how terrible the Android experience but my problem with Apple is that you are either fully in their ecosystem of you aren't a worthy enough customer in their mind. I have no desire to use iCloud or Apple mail or have an AppleID. I just want a small phone that gets updates, has maps, and has a decent music app.

Today we can buy a really good (and small) iPhone from $430 with the same powerful SoC than the bigger ones and more years of updates, so more future-proof than a similar price Android phone.

For markets outside the more expensive parts of the US, this is a big deal, because in a country where the monthly income excluding taxes is between $1500 and $2500 (like most of the UE countries), paying $1000 or more in a phone is a huge thing, and this inexpensive iPhone maybe have a reasonable price for those clients.

I don’t think Apple would actually want to grow their global market share beyond 30% or so. It would start eating into the brand’s premium image, and more importantly, would invite more uncomfortable antitrust attention.

They’re really at a sweet spot here IMO in the mobile market: not too big, not too small (like the Mac used to be in 1995-2005). It’s better for the company if revenue growth comes from services, high-margin computers (like the Mac Studio) and new devices rather than selling more phones.

I'd use iOS if they let me install whatever apps I wanted ("sideloading" as a term feels weird, as if they deign their users to load apps on the side, by their good graces. No, it's our hardware, we should be able to run whatever we want).

Android lets me do that, so I use it. No way I'd be without Vanced (rip) and other such apps. Android also has more interesting form factors, such as the folding phones, which Apple does not yet have.

Apple’s support cycles must play a part? You can get a 6S or SE from 2016 that will run mostly fine still at an okay price.

That’s without even mentioning the nightmare of trying to weigh up dozens of Android phones over multiple years, finding out which ones still work reliably several years down the line, etc.

After suffering through the Blackberry Storm and then a few Motorola Phones with the Motoblur, I tried a Nexus 4. I liked stock Android a lot better, but a bunch of my friends and family were using iPhones, and I wanted iMessage.

So I upgraded to a year-old iPhone 5, and have never looked back. It just worked better. Every app just worked, and the UI felt somehow smoother. I'm on an iPhone 11 right now.

Some of this may be due to the Librem 5.

In the time it took me to write this comment, they could have shipped anywhere from zero to one phones.

That's conceivably not nothing.

> iOS gained 6% between July 2018 and January 2022. From 19.4% then, Apple has grown its OS market share to 25.49%

I wonder why is it so hard for people to differentiate 6% from 6 percentage points

I am an Apple user. I migrated from Windows the the Mac in the late 90s, and the shift to OS X only cemented my relationship with the platform. Having a unixy (well, BSD-y) system with MS Office on it is a powerful combo for my line of work, and so I am still here.

I disdained the iPhone at first, but ended up getting won over pretty quickly. At introduction, it was just better than anything else, and the smooth connectivity between my Mac and my phone was really appealing. As the platform has grown, I've stayed with it; I've never really used Android for a long period of time except for a brief dalliance with a tablet a few years ago.

I'm not here to argue about which is better. I know which works better for ME, and is more appealing to ME. I say all this to establish my position. Silly people describe people like me as "fanboys," as though it's not possible to make a rational decision to use this ecosystem. Whatever.

HERE'S MY POINT:

I do not welcome news of Android market share loss. I do not want Apple to become the kind of dominant player in mobile that Microsoft was on the desktop 25 years ago. That kind of platform control inevitably becomes toxic, IMO. MSFT absolutely sought to exploit that position from the getgo; Apple doesn't seem to have the same kind of insane ALL PIE FOR ME motivation, but supermajority market share is a hell of a drug.

So while I have no interest in USING an Android phone or table, I very very much Android to right its ship and maintain their position as a peer or near-peer to iOS.

Credible competition is good for the market, and thus good for my preferred platform.

I'm carrying 2 phones these days, one iPhone SE that I've had for a couple years and look forward to getting OS updates on for another 3+ (unless I decide I just must have 5G and upgrade) and now a Samsung A53 5G that they've also promised will get at least 4 generations of OS upgrades. Without the newer trend towards longer support for devices, I'd probably have looked at a second iPhone instead.

Google (and handset vendors) started to make relying on an Android phone for more than a couple years just as unattractive as depending on a Google service for more than a few years. Combine that with the long-ago demise of "don't be evil" and the more recent utter failure of "fine, be evil, but at least don't be f*cking creepy" Google's a hard sell these days. The way all the rest of us get caught in the fallout of their internal (product) politics got old a long time ago.

Long time iOS user and spare-time developer.

Switched from iPhone 13 to a Google Pixel running GrapheneOS for my phone and Samsung Fold 3 for mobile Internet. I love the freedom to develop and sideload apps.

Syncthing for Android is amazing! (all my pictures/music/files are synchronized between devices without any cloud service, no longer Apple Music deciding to delete some of my music and replace it with less ).

Gadgetbridge is amazing too. No more accidental cloud sync ...

SwiftUI is a mess and for the small apps I write for myself Flutter/Dart makes much more sense, it was easier for me to understand, learn, and write quick apps.

Don't think I will ever go back to Apple's ecosystem.

The fold 3 is the future formfactor of phones for me (I don't need a tablet after I got one, I can read/annotate papers, watch lectures using vlc on the go ...). The only negative point is the battery life, yet I get over the day.

I was an Android person, mainly because I didn't want to spend >400 on a device (my OP3 lasted 5 years for 400 eur, ran Lineage). But there were no high end smaller smartphones. I got an iPhone 12 mini (2x what I normally paid), after getting used to it, I just feel there isn't a big difference between the 2 OSs. I like the high end feel, good cam, but Android phones of that price have that too. All my fav apps are there (with the exception of Gadgetbridge). It just works well for a self hoster (Home Assistant, NextCloud, don't even need davx5 for web/caldav), just as well as Android.

This is a war that Apple has already won even with their lower marketshare. I think the only interesting thing left in the mobile OS space is the idea of dumb smartphone OS's such as KaiOS for people who want to simplify their lives a bit.

KaiOS is a long way from perfectly usable just yet but you know that wonderfully relaxed feeling you get when you forget your phone and decide against driving back to get it? Perhaps that's the impetus for a new kind of challenger to iOS. A phone /OS who's best feature is that it actually does less.

Is the Huawei situation involved in this drop?

I really don't understand the hype for the iphone.

I own a oneplus 8t on Android 12, I particularly like the 120Hz display and the very fast charging (65w). When my battery is almost dead I can get to 30% in just a few minutes. Android 12 has been a big improvement, it is really snappy and good looking (Android 11 was already good). I bought the phone 550Euros, and during the last black friday it was sold for 350Euros. The camera is ok makes decent enough photos.

I tried last week-end my mum's iphone 13 and was really disappointed. She was not aware of faceid so I set it up with her, and the forced swipe up after unlocking the phone is annoying. On my phone, the fingerprint scanner is almost instantaneous and I get directly to the last opened application.

Also I saw that the phone gets constant ads for Apple products (we disabled notifications): Apple pay, Apple watch, Apple TV, etc. really annoying.

For me the main selling points for the iphone are the good camera and apple ecosystem integration. But the latter means that you are stuck with Apple hefty prices.

If Android managed to score the same integration that an iPhone has with a MacBook in windows, Linux or Mac, I would still have a windows laptop and a Pixel phone. Also I grew tired of the constant EOL of the google ecosystem and honestly iMessage in the US makes a big difference. In other countries WhatsApp is King so it doesn’t matter as much.

Who's surprised?

- More and more locked down bootloaders

- Less and less support and updates guarantee

- A mess on the interfaces provided: each brand as its own that no one can expect to be consistent

- Devices loose support after 2 years and enter in maintenance mode after that

- Expensive as iphone

So why would I want an iPhone? for locked down expensive experience then I should got an iPhone. Apple is pushing for updates and device support, so yes.

If Apple would give me a web interface for iMessage, so I could send/receive messages from a Windows machine… I'd switch back to an iPhone in a second.

I ditched macOS and iOS after major issues with the butterfly keyboards, and switching back to Windows. If iOS were more Windows-friendly in that way, it'd seal the deal.

But that'll probably never happen.

Based on the overwhelming Apple bias of comments here I did not expect to see that Android was 70% of the market and iPhone was 27% of the market, with iOS also declining ~3% recently.

I personally love my Android device and using my iPad is kind of torture. It feels like being transported back in time to 2014. The springboard hasn't changed in a decade and wasn't great when it was introduced (auto-arrange icons to the top left, as far from your fingers as possible, with no ability to lock icons and build muscle memory? What is this 2014?)

You open the App Store and things like "Temple Run" and other bangers from the 2012 era are prominently displayed. It's like nothing changes.

I do like iPhone for my parents, it's very easy for me to offer tech support over the phone.

I think ultimately it's nice not to be a slave to the status symbol culture. Most people I know with the expensive phones... it's only about status.

I just bought the Pixel 6. That's the flagship device for Android. It doesn't really get any better. It's fine as a phone. It's got a nice screen. The camera isn't bad. Reasonably priced (I payed 555 Euro). And all the other specs people seem to obsess about. But other than that, I struggle to see how this thing is any better than the cheap, four year old Nokia 7 Plus it replaced. I feel slightly ripped off actually. The only thing wrong with that device: the usb c connector was getting flaky (could not charge unless I held the cable just right) and it was no longer getting any security & feature upgrades because Google are being idiots. Lets face it: there has been no meaningful progress for Android phones in the last half decade. It doesn't matter what you buy. You get the same apps & experience with slightly different screens, batteries, cameras, etc.

That's the challenge in this space. A four year old cheap smart phone actually doesn't look half bad compared to the latest and greatest Google has to offer. Whatever Google did since Android 9, I don't really care for any of it. It's not really any better in any way that matters to me. IMHO the gesture bullshit is gimmicky & annoying and the endless Android theme tweaking close to irrelevant at this point. It doesn't feel exclusive to me; just different in a way that doesn't matter to me at all.

The reason Apple has progressed in terms of market share is that they doubled down on what matters. People seem to like IOS as it is and they did not mess with that too much. Other than that, good hardware improvements, software updates for almost anything they sold in the last eight years, and improvements where it matters (screen, camera, speed, etc.). You pay a premium for it but you get what you expect. And then you use the device until it breaks down and you get another one. They offer stability and incremental progress for the life time of the device. There's nothing that Android offers that IOS needs. It has it all.

With Android you're haggling on a lot of different specs between different vendors. And somehow you get a worse deal no matter what you choose. You can go Samsung and deal with their proprietary crap-ware. You can go generic Chinese & out of favor brand and deal with the fact that they've been cut off from the Google Play services. Or you can buy a few me too products from generic Android OEMs and obsess about how many pixels the screen has; how many redundant camera lenses they have, how bad the battery is, etc.

I actually like the Pixel 6 as a phone. But excuse me for not getting too excited about it because it's not exceptional in any way and Google will abandon supporting it in hurry for whatever their next shiny new hot thing is in six months.

Long time Android user, switched to iPhone when I broke the screen of my Google-gifted Nexus 3a. Final straw was the latest update. Every widget became bigger, with a border radius taking way too much space on the screen. Some widgets (e.g.: calendar) had part of the text hidden by the round edges. On top of that, I had a black-ish/brown-ish background and after the update all the UI was brown.

I honestly don't know what Google designers/engineers get paid to do if they can't even QA the software of one of their main devices.

I don't like Apple but I'm way happier now. Main complaint is the stupid photo/file separation. Just give me a normal filesystem please.

Android may get an upswing once it finally adopts Fuschia with a "classic" Android compatibility layer (at least that's what I think they will do).

But they will certainly have to push for devices with longer support than 3 years to keep that upswing.

Does "Samsung" mean Tizen or dumbphone (like Xcover 550)? Unknown/Other having the same color as Android? Also Windows Phone was discontinued 3 years ago. The interpretation of the data is rather reprehensible.

I think that's also about the time Apple started making some cheaper phone variants, which opened them up to more of the world in terms of being affordable to a wider audience. Apple always had the upper-end crowd and "prestige", but Android had a lot of the upper end and everything below, which is why they had 70+% market share. If Apple makes cheaper iPads/iPhones/iWatches, it will directly take away from Android in those spaces.

I sure hope this is just random noise and not a long term trend. I would NOT be happy about having to use Apple, or having any serious fragmentation of the mobile space.

Longtime devoted Nexus/Pixel user that started with the HTC Dream/Tmobile G1 as my first ever smartphone. I use an iphone SE (2020) now. I miss the palm sized computer that is an android phone and all its greater freedoms for sideloading, custom roms, etc.

But now I just want a stable quickly updated and patched phone I don't have to worry about. I want half a decade+ of updates.

Leaving the tinkering to the dirt cheap pinephone I have at home.

Have owned both Android and IPhone, both are great choices. If you want to configure your phone or want to interact with content, I'd say the Android wins.

To me one of the best Android phones is the OnePlus 8T, it has a large effective screen, modest weight and very good battery life.

But the IPhone X and also 13 are very tough phones, that can take a lot of abuse. With panzer glass it's an extremely durable (and fast) phone.

There is another reason, there were way more brands of android phones in the past. I'm looking to buy a new phone, a flagship and my choices are basically Samsung, oneplus and xiaomi, each with its own issues. Samsung s22 in Europe reviews show that its a failure. Oneplus software took the wrong direction the last few models and xiaomi is just xiaomi with ads all over the place.

I was a forever android man since the beginning, but now I'm rocking an iphone. Apple's ecosystem makes it so easy to stay in it. Want to upgrade from a 12 to a 13? No problem they took my old phone and gave me a whopping 700 bux for it which basically paid for the new one.

Oh and I can pick it up in 30 minutes locally.

Android cannot match this level of integration.

I have to say that my Android phones have gotten more buggy and less user friendly over the years.

One thing I do like about Android is that I can develop and publish apps for a reasonable fee. Apple wants $100 per year to be a developer. My apps are free so they don't make money. I would simply stop developing if I had to pay that.

I was a very vocal supporter of Android from about 2010 up until 2016. At a certain point, Google started chasing the iPhone with its Pixel line instead of trying to highlight the benefits that made Android unique. If I'm paying iPhone prices for hardware, then I might as well get an iPhone.

I think this is mostly related to the higher performance of iPhone models where you can finally buy a used one that doesn't feel sluggish.

That is, a sub $200 used iPhone is now very usable, where it hadn't been in the past.

I've been using Android since Google's Nexus One release. Although I enjoy the Android platform, I have huge issues with Google's services strategy and overall consideration for interoperability between their services. There's magic that's missing — magic that exists on Apple's platforms.

Also, the apps that Google does have are pretty terrible. Google Keep is not a strong competitor to Apple's offerings. The UI is terrible, it provides you with a long running list of your notes, labels instead of folders which is a fine option, but I'd rather have both for my workflow. Google Maps is an ad infested mess with more bugs than I can count. I'd be interested in knowing if it's as inconsistent and unreliable on iOS. There are features that straight up just do not work — it's unacceptable.

My biggest annoyance though? Google's love for A/B updates. There have been times where I've had a feature or option exposed to me just to disappear a few months later. I remember reading about new offerings in Google apps that could be accessed by doing x, y, and z. Often times the feature would be unavailable to me because it was "rolling out." I'd spend weeks repeating the steps to see if that new feature was available to me, but nope, it still was not. I eventually lost interest.

I'm not sure what I want to do for my next phone. The benefits of Android outweigh the cons, but on the other hand, maybe it's time for a change to experience what iOS is doing more. If Apple improves how notifications are handled with iOS 16, that might just provide me with the push that I need.

Oh... I also really love Twitter and iOS really seems like the best platform for Twitter. They have Tweetbot which has always been a gold standard, but there's also timeline syncing via iCloud. Mind you to take advantage of that I'd have to get an iPad and a Mac, too. At least the option's there though. Android relied on tweetmarker and when they died it left Android users SOL. Also, the only good third-party Twitter client on Android, Flamingo, is starting to show it's age and is no longer updated.

Ugh. The gaps between Android & Windows are becoming more and more apparent to me. Heck, Windows 11 still doesn't come with a good native calendar app. The default one by Microsoft is not optimized for productivity or even desktop displays. I digress, but still...

Anyways, I'll likely continue living in the Android world as its offerings are more aligned with my views. It's just hard accepting the recent mediocrity as a UX designer.

Every two months my company disables work access on my android phone because it doesn't have the latest security updates. That's one reason why I'm considering an iPhone in the future.

love my pixel 3a xl. big screen, cheap, no stupid notch/hole punch, and runs great. I never understood what people have trouble with on Android. all my banking, chatting, food, and travel apps work fine. also, has a headphone jack and uses usb-c!

my biggest complaint with smartphones these days is front facing camera makes no sense. put mini screen on back with back camera for selfies. if people want face unlock, a low quality, underscreen front facing camera should be suffient but to me, finger unlock on back is superior experience.

I've never had a complaint against the OS but I've only used Samsung phones. My main complaint with Android is the marketplace and automated support. It should not be possible to remove a livelihood without some human review and interaction. What a horrible experience people have had. How is that appropriate for an OS that supposedly is "developer friendly"? I will never open the Android SDK again, it's just not worth it.

As to the green bubble fracas, Google only has themselves to blame. Maybe they should hire competent leadership to make an genuinely interesting or useful social product. Years of focusing on leetcode has rotted their brains.

My next phone will be an iphone. Sorry Samsung, it wasn't your fault.

I can't stand Apple's required software like iTunes. Apple HW is great. Just hoping Asahi Linux is ready soon. Until then, Linux Chromebook is my dev machine

I got my wife a new iPhone right before the war started, and I swear, every time the migration process gets worse and worse. I installed iTunes, took a full backup of her old iPhone, restored it to the new one, and it was still missing her music, her movies, her books, despite containing all of that judging by the file size. I had to resort to 3rd party software to rip the data out of it and shove it into the new iPhone. And even then it managed to delete the books when I uploaded the music, forcing me to repeat the exercise.

At least with my Android phone I can simply plug it in my PC and copy the files I need in either direction.

I buy directly from Samsung and am very happy with my Android experience. All of my friends who bought Android through their carrier hated their experience.

> So what’s behind this even erosion of Android’s command of the OS Market? StockApps.com’s finance expert Edith Reads ... She attributes Android losing its ground to increased competition within the space ... ” Android’s loss of market share boils down to heightened competition within the OS space. A look at the data shows that iOS gained 6% between July 2018 and January 2022. From 19.4% then, Apple has grown its OS market share to 25.49%.”

Wow, Android share went down because iOS share went up? Thank goodness we had a finance expert to provide this amazing insight.

Google needs to address privacy and upgrade policy. Phone should have 5 years upgrade policy. 0 global ids or telemetry.

Facebook, Netflix, now Google - eventually the bs (unethical practices) catches up and bites you back.

i have an android phone and an ipad. IpadOS frustrates me nearly daily. Maybe I am thinking too android or windows-like but I just don't understand some of the choices regarding settings and file management.

And? Does it really matter? Android is the #1 OS of all user devices worldwide. When you're at the top only one direction to go... iOS gained a bit in the developed world but Android enables tons of people all over the world to communicate and do things.

I'd rather go phoneless than use iOS. Terrible terrible OS for engineer

I've always used Android, thinking that it would improve with age. But eventually I had to face the fact that Android is always going to suck. On top of that every year it gets more and more locked down. Why not buy an iphone instead? At least it works well.

Sure: https://gs.statcounter.com/os-market-share#monthly-201001-20... ?