Interestingly, it won’t be Apple taking the credit for nibbling away Android’s market share, but Windows Phone. Indeed, Apple is expected to see its market share slip just a tad from 20.5% this year to 19% in 2016. By contrast, Windows Phone will be outselling iOS phones by that time, as its market share grows from an estimated 5.2% this year to 19.2% in four years, putting it in the No. 2 slot. (To keep that in perspective, iOS will still see healthy 10% CAGR growth in that time frame.)
Unsurprisingly, with Nokia now committed to Windows Phone, Symbian is fast slipping into obscurity. IDC expects Symbian-powered smartphone shipments to effectively grind to a halt in the next two years.
More surprisingly, however, the same fate won’t befall BlackBerry OS, the current woes of Research In Motion notwithstanding. IDC insists there will still be a market for BlackBerry OS-powered devices in emerging markets, for example, where users are looking for affordable messaging devices.
However, while BlackBerry will more or less maintain its current market share level (projected to be 6% this year and 5.9% in 2016), IDC’s Restivo says the gulf between the BlackBerry OS and its primary competition “will widen as the mobile phone market becomes increasingly software/app-oriented and the ‘bring your own device’ enterprise trend proliferates.”