Android market share to surge over next four years
BlackBerry's share will stay about the same, though Apple's iOS is expected to lose some share, falling from 14.7% this year to 10.9% in 2014. Rounding up the top five, Microsoft will recapture some of its lost mobile market share through its new Windows Phone platform."IDC believes the market will comfortably support up to five OS players over the next five years," Kevin Restivo, a senior research analyst with IDC, said in a statement. "Shorter replacement cycles and an ample feature phone to smartphone upgrade opportunity means the smartphone OS market will remain fragmented but healthy for the foreseeable future."Looking at the near term, consumer demand higher than expected should help the market grow 55.4 percent this year over 2009, 10 percent higher than IDC's previous forecast last quarter. Amid launches of the iPhone 4, BlackBerry Torch, and HTC Evo 4G, 269.6 million smartphones will ship this year, compared with 173.5 million last year, estimates IDC. The surge in demand will lead to overall growth of 14.1 percent this year, 1.5 percent higher than IDC's prior forecast and a nice improvement over last year when the market dropped 2.8 percent. The smartphone market will enjoy further gains of 24.5 percent next year before declining to annual growth of 13.6 percent in 2014.In a separate report earlier this week, Piper Jaffray was especially bullish on Android, saying it would likely control half of the smartphone market within five years.
