One in every two smartphones sold in the world run Android

By George Wong on 11/15/2011 17:13 PDT

It took awhile, but Google’s domination of the mobile platform has finally occurred. According to the latest findings by Gartner, Android now has 52.5% market share worldwide – up from 43.4% last quarter and double the 25.3% from one year ago. And even better news for Google – the operating system has been stealing the market from almost every other smartphone platform.

Even though iOS grew by almost 4 million unit sales in the third quarter, the market share dropped from 16.6$ down to 15%. However, it’s expected to pick up again this upcoming quarter since the 4S will be available in more locations worldwide. Samsung’s Bada rose from 1.1% up to 2.2%: ahead of Microsoft’s Windows Phone 7 which is at 1.5%.

Symbian continued its decline and is now at 16.9% (it was 36.3% a year ago), and RIM’s BlackBerry OS also dropped to 11%. However, RIM’s poor sales this quarter might be due to BBX phones being released next year – people might be holding out on buying new BlackBerry phones.

It looks like Android’s biggest competitor is iOS which is pretty impressive, considering that Apple only introduces one phone a year. I wonder what the smartphone market share will look like this time next year.

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Android Android is mobile operating system from Google. The software was originally built by a company called Android Inc, that was purchased by Google in 2005. From its modest debuts, Android has become a powerhouse that powers not only smartphones and tablet, but a host of other less high-profile devices and gadgets. Although Android is not a community-driven project, Google does release the source code as open-source under the Apache license.

Google Google is an Internet Search company with profits mainly derived from its AdWords advertising program. Google is also known for other high-profile web-related products such as Chrome, GMail, Google Docs or Google Map, and it has also made a very successful entry into the mobile handset market with its Android mobile operating system. The company was created in 1998 and went public in 2004. Google is one of the most visited site in the world.

iOS was once upon a time called iPhone OS, or "operating system", which is the software that provides all the basic device functionality and is the interface between the hardware and applications. iOS was introduced with the iPhone on January 9 2007, and it was originally not intended to be programmable by third parties. Steve Jobs had envisioned that developers could create Web Apps that would run in the browser. This changed less than one year after when the iPhone SDK (software development kit) was introduced in October 2007. Today, hundreds of thousands of apps have been created for this platform. iPhone OS became iOS on June 2010. Interestingly, both iPhone and iOS were former trademarks of Cisco, that Apple now uses under a license.

Samsung Samsung is a South-Korean conglomerate which counts many subsidiaries like Samsung Electronics, which you probably know very well, but also Samsung Heavy Industries which builds ships, or Samsung Life Insurance, Samsung Securities and many more. Samsung is responsible for an amazing 20% of South Korea's exports. In the consumer electronics world, Samsung has gone from being a company with a reputation for cheap products to becoming one of the most respected companies in the world.

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