"It will be difficult for Microsoft to make inroads in mobile but the next paradigm shift might give it the opportunity to regain dominance. “Windows won the desktop war but the battlefield moved on,” Cullen said. Windows maintains a dominant lead when it comes to local and global desktop OS market share, at 84 percent globally and 72 percent in Australia. Apple’s OSX held 13.54 percent market share in Australia, a marginal increase from 13.21 percent last year.Ĭullen said the growth of internet enabled smartphones and the decline in PC sales were contributors to the Android rise. Conversely, mobile operating systems iOS and Android have risen, with iOS reaching 31.4 percent up from 27.8 percent and Android sitting in third place with 15.3 percent, up from 12.8 percent. Looking to Australia, Windows remains the leading OS overall, though it has lost a slice of its market share, slipping to 37.9 percent in March, down from 43.9 percent for the same period last year.
#ANDROID OS MARKET SHARE FOR ANDROID#
It also represents a major breakthrough for Android which held just 2.4 percent of global internet usage share only five years ago,” he said. “It marks the end of Microsoft’s leadership worldwide of the OS market which it has held since the 1980s. The web analytics company’s chief executive, Aodhan Cullen, said it was a milestone in technology history and “the end of an era”. StatCounter found that in March, Android hit 37.93 percent market share, which put it 0.02 percentage points ahead of Windows, at 37.91 percent. With the latter category’s huge influence doing most of the heavy lifting to push that result.
The Google-developed OS has topped Windows in terms of total internet usage across desktop, laptop, tablet and mobile combined. Android has overtaken Microsoft's Windows as the world's most popular operating system for the first time, a report by StatCounter has revealed.