In terms of device ownership Android already outstripped Apple. Now it has overtaken iOS in terms of OS share.

Turn the clock back 12 months. Despite the fact that Android had over 80% market share of smartphone shipments and outstripped iOS in the tablet market by having 53% share compared to Apple is 40%, it came in a poor second in terms of web usage.

Here is the breakdown of mobile operating system share for August 2013, when iOS had almost double the usage share compared to Android:

In the latest chart from NetMarketShare many of the colors are assigned differently. Android now has the market leader's blue slice while iOS has turned green:

The share of the pie occupied by the also-rans has shrunk from 17% to 11% with only one device showing an increase - Windows Phone going from less than one percent to two and a half percent.

As the NetMarketShare trend chart show the decrease in iOS share and the increase for Android (which is the green line in the chart), and the corresponding decrease for iOS (blue) has been a steady one.

You need to look at the table to see that Windows Phone's share actually decreased from August 2013 to April 2014 but made a dramatic leap from 0.83% to 2.10% in May and, after a dip in June, arrived at 2.49% in July.

It is interesting to return to a forecast we reported on at the beginning of 2011 in which Ovum's Tony Cripps predicted:

"We believe that Apple constituted 90% of the market in 2010. However, by 2015 we expect this market share to drop to 35% and Google's market share to rise to 36%. Other software platforms, such as RIM's Blackberry Tablet OS and HP's webOS, will find some success but between them all they will only account for 29% of the market."

So while the headline, Google's OS Set To Dominate, has turned out to be correct, the expectations for Blackberry OS, which was in second place between iOS has Android in January 2011, turned out to be horribly wrong. Who even remembers HP's tablet? And even if it does achieve third place, Windows Phone market share (light blue in the pie below) is unlikely to make a serious dent either in terms of shipments or usage.

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