Gartner: in Q4 2020, Apple sold 80M new iPhones globally, overtaking Samsung to become the largest smartphone vendor, increasing its market share by ~15%
there's really no other platform this stable, interconnected, private and updated. https://twitter.com/... Brian Roemmele / @brianroemmele : Boom! Apple is now the largest smart vendor. Market share increases by ~15% and rising. The cheap ad based phones comes at a price and a lower value. Higher values sell more phones. https://twitter.com/...
Context & Ripple Effects
Apple entered this period after a 2019 market in which Huawei had moved ahead of Apple in global shipments while Samsung retained the overall lead. Gartner's Q4 result therefore marks a sharp change in the ranking at the end of 2020, not merely a marginal share gain.
Later coverage shows the Apple-Samsung contest remained unusually tight: Apple led annual shipments in the 2023 global ranking, and Apple again held a narrow lead in 2025 market-share data.
First-order effects
- Apple takes Gartner's Q4 top-vendor position on 80 million iPhone sales, while Samsung loses the quarter's No. 1 rank.
- Apple's roughly 15% market-share increase gives its iPhone business a stronger position in the period's global vendor comparison.
Second-order effects
- Samsung faces a more direct competitive contest with Apple for global leadership, rather than a market defined solely by Samsung's prior top position and Huawei's 2019 advance.
- The Q4 result makes shipment share and reporting-period leadership a recurring competitive measure for Apple and Samsung, as later annual rankings continue to separate them narrowly.
Third-order effects
- The coverage points to a more concentrated top tier in smartphones, with Apple and Samsung repeatedly determining the global lead across quarterly and annual measurements.
- Vendor leadership is becoming less a permanent title than a reporting-period outcome: Apple's Q4 lead, Samsung's Q1 2025 lead, and Apple's 2023 and 2025 annual leads illustrate how small share changes can reorder the market.
The trend: Global smartphone leadership is evolving into a close Apple-Samsung contest in which the leader can change with the measurement period.