Monday, 24 Octorber 2011
Nordic based mobile analytics provider, CEM4Mobile has updated its smartphone predictions and now expects that Android will overtake Nokia Symbian and Apple's iOS in the region before the end of the year.
Back in February, they predicted that Android will become the market leader in the Nordic countries. They also forecasted Android to overtake Symbian in August 2011, and it did for couple of weeks, but Nokia has managed to resist the decline in its market shares with new handset releases and improved versions of Symbian.
Nevertheless, iOS has managed to obtain the lead position particularly due to the platform's high popularity in Denmark and Sweden leaving Android and Symbian at even market shares in September. However, all operating systems are in the same ballpark having 28-33% of the market share.
Through all of the competition, Android has shown in the last five months a strong average market share change increase of 6.16% per month. This combined with Apple iOS's slight drop of -1.46% and Symbian's drop of -1.70% per month suggest that it won't be too long before Android climbs to the top position.
The changes in operating system market shares
This update was based on 21 million transaction sample of mobile browsing services page loads from May to September 2011 from Nordic countries.
Mobile Operating System Market Shares from Scandinavian Mobile Browsing Services
| Platform | May | June | July | August | Sept | Change |
|---|
| Apple iOS | 35% | 35% | 32% | 34% | 33% | -1.46% |
| Symbian OS | 31% | 30% | 29% | 27% | 29% | -1.70% |
| Android | 22% | 24% | 26% | 28% | 28% | 6.16% |
| Nokia OS | 5% | 5% | 5% | 5% | 5% | -0.77% |
| Sony Ericsson | 3% | 3% | 3% | 3% | 2% | -5.47% |
| Samsung OS | 2% | 1% | 2% | 1% | 1% | -2.49% |
The results are showing all platforms are continuing to lose market share to Android which is showing steady strong growth on mobile services. Despite the trend, Apple iOS still had a 4% lead on the other platforms as of September.
"It remains to be seen how much the unfortunate recent loss of Apple's founder Steve Jobs will impact Apple's performance, how much the recent patent disputes will slow down the adoption of Android and at which point Nokia's and Microsoft's effort on Windows Phone 7 start impacting the trends", comments Janne Aalto, the CEO of CEM4Mobile Solutions.
If this trend continues unchanged, Android looks set to overtake Symbian again in October 2011 and Apple iOS by the end of December 2011. Without any major movements in the OS market, Android will continue to grow towards the forecast of nearly 38% of the market by the end of Q1 / 2012.
