Android has now captured 80 per cent of the global smartphone market, according to second quarter results analysed by research firm Strategy Analytics.
According to the research, the Android operating system now accounts for 79.5 per cent of the global market, with Apple's iOS representing only 13.6 per cent.
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Compared to the same time period a year ago - Q2 2012 - Android's market share has increased by 10 per cent. In comparison, Apple's share has fallen by three percentage points, from 16.6 per cent.
Meanwhile, Microsoft's share increased slightly, rising from 3.6 per cent to 3.9 per cent in the past year. This small improvement suggests that Microsoft's general performance in the mobile space - across its Windows Phone 8, Surface RT and other mobile Windows 8 systems - is reaching a plateau. Confirmation earlier this week that the company had spent more than it had earned on selling and promoting its Surface tablets seems representative of the entire situation.
Android's increase in popularity has also had a big impact on Strategy Analytics' "Others" category, which has seen a decline from a 10.4 per cent market share in Q2 2012 to just three per cent this year.
With Nokia's Symbian and BlackBerry's self-titled OS declining in use in that time, the results feel testament to a slack period for BlackBerry, whose BlackBerry 10 platform has failed to enchant the consumer or enterprise world, resulting in a disappointing quarter of just 2.7m sales of its brand new flagship handsets, the Z10 and Q10.
