Latest data shows Android with 81.2% of the global smartphone market for 2014

The latest data from Strategy Analytics shows that while Apple's iOS is on the rise and Android is slumping, the latter still owned 81.2% of the global smartphone market for all of last year. That is up from the 78.9% market share that Android held for 2013. 1.4 billion Android handsets shipped during 2014, up from the 780.8 million tallied in 2013.

For the fourth quarter, 291.7 million Android flavored models were shipped, good enough to equal 76.7% of global smartphone shipments during the three months. That is up from the 227.3 million units in transit during Q3 in 2013. However, the overall large increase in smartphone shipments means that Android actually had a higher 78.3% share of the market in the year-ago quarter.

Apple's iOS was a distant second with 192.7 million units shipped for 2014. That equals 15% of last year's global smartphone market, down from the 15.5% iOS held for all of 2013. For the fourth quarter of 2014, Apple shipped the now famous 74.5 million iPhones which is equivalent to 19.5% of the smartphone market.

Microsoft shipped 38.8 million units in 2014, three million more than the prior year. On a percentage basis, that works out to a 3% market share for Windows Phone for all of last year, down from the 3.6% it garnered in 2013. For the fourth quarter of 2014, 11.3 million Windows Phone units were shipped which was good enough to represent 3% of the market. That was up from the prior year's 9.6 million units, which equaled 3.3% of the global smartphone market.

For 2014, 1.028 billion smartphones were shipped, up from 990 million the year before. For the fourth quarter, 380.1 million units were in transit versus the prior year's 290.2 million


source: StrategyAnalytics