Over one billion Android smartphones were shipped worldwide in 2014 according to research conducted by Strategy Analytics. This number grew from 780 million in 2013, and gave Android devices a global market share of 81.2%. For comparison, Apple maintained 15% of the global smartphone market with iOS devices, down 0.5% from the previous year. However, unlike Android devices which can come in at sub-AUD$100 price-points, new Apple handsets all typically retail around the AUD$900 mark for entry level models.
While 38.8 million Windows Phone devices were shipped in 2014, 3 million more than in 2013, the overall market share for phones running Microsoft's operating system fell by 0.6% to a round 3%. In its latest quarterly earnings call, Microsoft reported a phone hardware revenue of USD$2.3 billion, with 10.5 million Lumia devices sold in the three months ending December 31. This growth was spurred on Microsoft's lower-end, affordable smartphones.
Total smartphone shipments for 2014 hit almost 1.3 billion units, up 30% from 2013. Strategy Analytics attributes this growth to emerging markets such as China and Indonesia, countries who will continue to bolster the industry in 2015.
Source: Strategy Analytics
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