Android dominates sales

Kantar has published a new study confirming the upward trend of Android, which is still well ahead of its main rivals in the smartphone market, which are already the best-sellers. Apple's operating system, iOS, lost some ground in the United States, the country where it carries the most weight, and, in general, worldwide. In Spain, Google's platform dominance is overwhelming. In this case, the data is especially relevant, as it corresponds to device sales in the last quarter of the year, which includes key shopping dates such as Christmas or Black Friday. According to Kantar data, Android devices increased their share compared to the same quarter of the previous year in all markets studied. The greatest growth took place in the three countries that make up LatAm 3 (Brazil, Mexico, and Argentina), where it went from 61.6% to 83.5%. However, in this case it was due to the fall of BlackBerry (-7.5 percentage points) and other non-advanced operating systems, as iOS only lost 0.1 points. Italy (12 points of growth), Germany (6.4 points), and the United States (4.4 points) are other markets where this situation is evident. In Spain, on the other hand, Android seems somewhat stagnant, but it is logical. The operating system's dominance in the country has little room left for growth. This data is good news for the platform, but not necessarily for manufacturers, who face an increasingly saturated market with increasingly powerful competition. This is the case for Samsung, a company that after years of accelerated growth "is under real pressure in most regions," according to this report. The company's percentage in Europe has fallen 2.2 points to 40.3% and has stopped growing in China, a country from which many of its rivals come (currently Xiaomi dominates sales). The fact that the Galaxy S4 failed to match the sales of its predecessor has also contributed to this, although the Galaxy S5 could change this trend. For its part, the third contender, Windows Phone, still benefits from BlackBerry's dire situation. Its sales have only fallen in Latin America (one of its key markets) and it is especially significant that it has managed to carve out a niche in the United States, where it achieved 4.3% of sales. In Europe it has achieved three consecutive quarters with double digits, but it only grows 3% per year.