Android continues dominance in global smartphone sales

According to figures from Gartner, 344.3 million Android smartphones were sold worldwide in Q2 2016. This makes for a 4.3% increase in sales year on year.

Samsung is still the undisputed market leader, selling no less than 76.7 million handsets in Q2 with a 22.3% market share. This puts the South Korean tech giant way ahead of Apple (44.3 million, 12.9%). Samsung is followed by three Chinese manufacturers: Huawei (30.6 million, 8.9%), Oppo (18.4 million, 5.4%) and Xiaomi (15.5 million, 4.5%). Note that Apple is the only one of the top five phone makers to see a fall in sales, dropping 3.7 million and 1.7 percentage points of market share in the space of a year.

As for operating systems, Android and iOS alone account for 99.1% of smartphone sales. Google's Android is still storming ahead of Apple's mobile OS, shipping with 86.2% of smartphones sold worldwide, compared with 12.9% for iOS.

Sales of handsets running Windows are now trivial after being in freefall for a year, slipping from a 2.5% market share to just 0.6%, or 1.9 million smartphones sol, in Q2. Blackberry fares even worse, claiming just 0.1% of smartphone sales worldwide, down from 0.3% in Q2 of 2015.