Android grabs 80 percent of global smartphone market in Q2 2013

There are a ton of studies about smartphones done every month, but here’s an interesting one. A study by Strategy Analytics has found that Android is the most dominant operating system on smartphones in the world. The study states that around 80 percent of handsets that were sold in Q2 of 2013 ran on Android, according to Fox News.

iPhone sales, by comparison, accounted for 14 percent of the global smartphone sale pie. Microsoft, on the other hand, is a distant third with a meagre 4 percent of the market share.

According to Strategy Analytics, 34.6 million Android tablets have been sold in the same time frame. This number is quite high, especially when compared to Apple’s iPad, which sold less than half of that number at 14.6 million.

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8 out of 10 smartphones sold were Android

The success of Google’s operating system has been chalked up to the wide number of smartphone and tablet manufacturers that use the operating system on their own devices. With companies like Sony, HTC, LG and, who can forget, Samsung flexing their marketing muscles, it would have been surprising if Android didn’t dominate the market.

With the highs also come the lows, however. Since so many different companies are making Android devices, all with their own custom software and UIs and across many different price-ranges and variable hardware, fragmentation has been a rampant problem for Google’s OS.

Apple, on the other hand, has managed to play in the same field despite pushing out only one handset every year. Diversifying the iPad line-up with last year’s newest entrant—the iPad mini—has also undoubtedly helped the Cupertino-based company to push out a larger number of tablets.