Google”s Android, undisputed leader of smartphone OS
If you just look at the number of people using Android phones in the world, it would appear that Apple”s iOS has only a few takers, but a look at the amount of money people spend on Apple”s App Store paints a different picture.
It has been 12 years since Steve Jobs introduced iOS – then called iPhone OS — in 2007. Google bought Android Inc., a startup founded by Andy Rubin, at an estimated cost of $50 million in 2005. The first phone running the Android operating system — T-Mobile G1 (aka the HTC Dream) — hit the market in 2008, more than a year after the first iPhone.
Now the International Data Corporation (IDC), which forecasts worldwide smartphone shipments to decline 1.9 per cent in 2019 to 1.375 billion units, down from 1.402 billion in 2018, predicts that the share of the Android operating system in the worldwide smartphone market will grow to 87.1 per cent in 2023 from 86.7 per cent in 2019.
