Android back on top in Aussie handset market

Australia’s mobile phone market grew 18.4% year-on-year by unit shipments during the second quarter to 2.16 million, as Android retook the crown of the nation’s most popular smartphone OS, research firm IDC said.

While iOS had supplanted Android in the fourth quarter of last year to take a 54% share of the market, Android overtook iOS last quarter, grabbing a 63% market share.

The reversal was due to multiple major Android device launches during the quarter as well as a slowdown in iPhone 7 shipments. “This slowdown was expected as consumers hold off purchase before the new flagship launch expected in the latter half of the year,” IDC Australia senior market analyst Bilal Javed said.

Windows Phone shipments meanwhile fell further during the second quarter, with the platform taking less than 1% of the market due to a shortage of new devices and apps on the platform.

Despite its decline during the quarter, Apple maintained the top spot in terms of individual vendors, with a 37% market share compared to 34% for Samsung.

But this represented a significant recovery for Samsung, which had seen its market share shrink to 23% in the first quarter following last year’s recall of its former flagship smartphone, the Galaxy Note 7, due to the exploding battery issue. The popularity of the new Galaxy S8 and Galaxy S8+ handsets helped drive this recovery.

IDC said the remaining market share is being hotly contested, with Alcatel and Chinese handset maker Oppo each taking a 5% share during the quarter, fellow Chinese vendor Huawei increasing its market share to 4%, and another Chinese, vendor ZTE — which produces branded low-cost Telstra smartphones — taking a 6% share.

Image courtesy Huawei.

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