Google under threat as forked Android devices rise to 20% of smartphone shipments
Android dominates the world's smartphone market. A new report from analyst firm Strategy Analytics pegs the Google-owned operating system's global market share at 85 percent.
Context & Ripple Effects
Android's climb to dominance has been the defining mobile story since it overtook every rival to become the world's leading smartphone platform in early 2011, then pushed past two-thirds of global sales by Q1 2013. Strategy Analytics' new numbers extend that arc: 85 percent worldwide share.
The wrinkle in this report is what sits inside that 85 percent. A fifth of shipments are forked builds that run the open-source code without Google's services layer — meaning the platform's growth and Google's control over it have decoupled. The story travelled widely on release day, picked up by ABI Research, ITworld and others.
First-order effects
- Google now faces a market where one in five 'Android' phones ships with no Play Store or Google Mobile Services, cutting its distribution for search, ads and app revenue on exactly the devices driving its volume growth.
Second-order effects
- App developers and content providers must weigh building for non-GMS forks separately from certified Android, splitting their Android engineering budgets and giving fork operators a chance to seed rival app stores and services.
Third-order effects
- If the forked share keeps climbing, Android hardens into two tiers — a Google-governed certified ecosystem and an open-source base others control — eroding the gatekeeper leverage Google built by giving the OS away.
The trend: Android is becoming the world's default mobile OS faster than Google can convert that volume into controlled distribution, as forks capture a growing slice of shipments.