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Market share

Android is the most used operating system on phones in virtually all countries, with some countries, such as India, having over 96% market share. On tablets, usage is more even, as iOS is a bit more popular globally.

Research company Canalys estimated in the second quarter of 2009, that Android had a 2.8% share of worldwide smartphone shipments. By May 2010, Android had a 10% worldwide smartphone market share, overtaking Windows Mobile, whilst in the US Android held a 28% share, overtaking iPhone OS. By the fourth quarter of 2010, its worldwide share had grown to 33% of the market becoming the top-selling smartphone platform, overtaking Symbian. In the US it became the top-selling platform in April 2011, overtaking BlackBerry OS with a 31.2% smartphone share, according to comScore.

By the third quarter of 2011, Gartner estimated that more than half (52.5%) of the smartphone sales belonged to Android. By the third quarter of 2012 Android had a 75% share of the global smartphone market according to the research firm IDC.

In July 2011, Google said that 550,000 Android devices were being activated every day, up from 400,000 per day in May, and more than 100 million devices had been activated with 4.4% growth per week. In September 2012, 500 million devices had been activated with 1.3 million activations per day. In May 2013, at Google I/O, Sundar Pichai announced that 900 million Android devices had been activated.

Android market share varies by location. In July 2012, "mobile subscribers aged 13+" in the United States using Android were up to 52%, and rose to 90% in China. During the third quarter of 2012, Android's worldwide smartphone shipment market share was 75%, with 750 million devices activated in total. In April 2013, Android had 1.5 million activations per day. As of May 2013, 48 billion application ("app") installation have been performed from the Google Play store, and by September 2013, one billion Android devices had been activated.

As of August 2020, the Google Play store had over 3 million Android applications published, and as of May 2016, apps had been downloaded more than 65 billion times. The operating system's success has made it a target for patent litigation as part of the so-called " smartphone wars " between technology companies.

Android devices account for more than half of smartphone sales in most markets, including the US, while "only in Japan was Apple on top" (September–November 2013 numbers). At the end of 2013, over 1.5 billion Android smartphones had been sold in the four years since 2010, making Android the most sold phone and tablet OS. Three billion Android smartphones were estimated to be sold by the end of 2014 (including previous years). According to Gartner research company, Android-based devices outsold all contenders, every year since 2012. In 2013, it outsold Windows 2.8:1 or by 573 million. As of 2015, Android has the largest installed base of all operating systems; Since 2013, devices running it also sell more than Windows, iOS and Mac OS X devices combined.

According to StatCounter, which tracks only the use for browsing the web, Android is the most popular mobile operating system since August 2013. Android is the most popular operating system for web browsing in India and several other countries (e.g. virtually all of Asia, with Japan and North Korea exceptions). According to StatCounter, Android is most used on phones in all African countries, and it stated "mobile usage has already overtaken desktop in several countries including India, South Africa and Saudi Arabia", with all countries in Africa having done so already in which mobile (including tablets) usage is at 90.46% (Android only, accounts for 75.81% of all use there).

While Android phones in the Western world almost always include Google's proprietary code (such as Google Play) in the otherwise open-source operating system, Google's proprietary code and trademark is increasingly not used in emerging markets; "The growth of AOSP Android devices goes way beyond just China ABI Research claims that 65 million devices shipped globally with open-source Android in the second quarter of, up from 54 million in the first quarter"; depending on country, percent of phones estimated to be based only on AOSP source code, forgoing the Android trademark: Thailand (44%), Philippines (38%), Indonesia (31%), India (21%), Malaysia (24%), Mexico (18%), Brazil (9%).

According to a January 2015 Gartner report, "Android surpassed a billion shipments of devices in 2014, and will continue to grow at a double-digit pace in 2015, with a 26 percent increase year over year." This made it the first time that any general-purpose operating system has reached more than one billion end users within a year: by reaching close to 1.16 billion end users in 2014, Android shipped over four times more than iOS and OS X combined, and over three times more than Microsoft Windows. Gartner expected the whole mobile phone market to "reach two billion units in 2016", including Android. Describing the statistics, Farhad Manjoo wrote in The New York Times that "About one of every two computers sold today is running Android. has become Earth's dominant computing platform."

According to a Statistica 's estimate, Android smartphones had an installed base of 1.8 billion units in 2015, which was 76% of the estimated total number of smartphones worldwide. Android has the largest installed base of any mobile operating system and, since 2013, the highest-selling operating system overall with sales in 2012, 2013 and 2014 close to the installed base of all PCs.

In the second quarter of 2014, Android's share of the global smartphone shipment market was 84.7%, a new record. This had grown to 87.5% worldwide market share by the third quarter of 2016, leaving main competitor iOS with 12.1% market share.

According to an April 2017 StatCounter report, Android overtook Microsoft Windows to become the most popular operating system for total Internet usage. It has maintained the plurality since then.

In September 2015, Google announced that Android had 1.4 billion monthly active users. This changed to 2 billion monthly active users in May 2017.