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As this chart from Statista shows, the smartphone market is a lot more profitable and far less diverse than it was seven years ago, thanks to the dominating success of a select few manufacturers.
Overall smartphones manufacturers sell five times more devices than they did in 2010. While iOS' share of the market can only be attributed to Apple, Android's share is split among a number of manufacturers including Google and Samsung. Companies making phones that use Android sold a total of 1.3 billion smartphones in 2017 - more than four times the total number of smartphones sold in 2010.
It's a welcome change for app developers who can now create something that works for the majority - or at least a significant fraction - of smartphone owners. On the other hand, it's an unfortunate evolution for now non-existent operating systems like Blackberry and for the manufacturers responsible for the 1.5 million smartphones running an operating system that isn't iOS or Android.
Jenny Cheng/Business Insider
