Forecast: Global mobile operating systems, 2012-2017

Table of Contents

  1. Summary
  2. Smartphone OS shipment trends
  3. Conclusions
  4. About Peter Crocker
  5. Appendix: smartphone shipments by OS

1. Summary

PLEASE NOTE: In order to make the pdf version available, we had to break the original report “Forecast: Global mobile operating systems and broadband, 2012-2017” into two sections. The broadband forecast is here. We apologize for the inconvenience.

Unless it does something dramatic with its product pricing, Apple will not have much influence on the next billion smartphone users. Despite its much-documented fragmentation issues, Google’s Android is the operating system (OS) to beat as smartphones move into the 4G era.

Key findings from this mobile operating systems forecast include:

  • With its global dominance, Android will see its share of shipments increase in 2013 to 72 percent. It will lose a little share after that but not to Apple. We forecast Android will have a 64-percent share of global shipments in 2017, at which point Apple’s share will have declined to 11 percent from 20 percent in 2012.
  • Despite some loss of shares by the two leaders, we’re forecasting a very conservative shakeout. Linux-based operating systems will contend with Samsung’s Tizen and Microsoft’s Windows Mobile for market share in different regions, but none will emerge with double-digit shares worldwide in the five-year horizon.

This report is built off the core global mobile subscribers and handsets forecast model.

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