Gartner has released a new report which says that manufacturers sold 432 million smartphones in the fourth quarter of 2016, a 7 percent year-over-year increase. Of those, only 0.0481 percent were BlackBerry devices, effectively dropping the once-dominant Canadian smartphone maker’s market share to zero. Google’s Android had the lead worldwide with 81.7 percent, while Apple’s iOS has 17.9 percent of the mobile OS market.
However, when you break the smartphone market out by manufacturer instead of by OS, the picture is a little different. Apple is now the number one smartphone maker with 17.9 percent of the market, followed by Samsung with 17.8 percent. China’s Huawei was in third place with a 9.5 percent share. “This is the second consecutive quarter in which Samsung has delivered falling quarterly smartphone sales,” said Anshul Gupta, research director at Gartner. “Samsung’s smartphone sales declined 8 percent in the fourth quarter of 2016 and its share dropped by 2.9 percentage points year on year.”
