Android loses 8% market share while iOS grows

Apple dominates worldwide with the Apple Watch, and has taken a majority share of US headphone sales, but the iPhone is dramatically outnumbered by Android phones.

There are countless Android manufacturers, but they all use Google's OS and research firm StockApps has been examining the prevalence of Android OS versus iOS.

It reports that in 2018, at Android's highest ever share, the OS had 77.32% of the market. As of January 2022, that share was down to 69.74%.

"Android's loss of market share boils down to heightened competition within the OS space," says StockApps finance expert Edith Reads. "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%," she continued. "Other small scale OS developers account for the remaining 1.58% that Google shed."

So iOS has increased its share by 6.09% as Android has shrunk. It doesn't materially change that Android has the greater number of phones in the market.

Percentage shares also take no account of whether a market has grown or not in these last five years. So it can't be extrapolated either that Apple is able to attract more new users, nor that the maturing market is coming to prefer iOS.