That Android, Google’s mobile operating system that we spend countless hours every year obsessing over and tracking its every tiny twist and turn, is the greatest mobile operating system on Earth and preferred by more of humanity than its nearest competitor, has never been in doubt. Unapologetically so.
Going forward, Android has even more bragging rights. It is now officially the world’s most popular operating system, universally not just on mobile, when it comes to internet usage.
This milestone was achieved in the just-ended month of March, 2017, according to independent web analytics firm StatCounter which released its latest findings earlier in the day.
For the first time since its debut in the 80s, Microsoft’s dominant Windows desktop operating system has been forced to play second fiddle to an operating system that was barely existent a decade ago.
Android garnered a 37.93% share of the global internet usage market narrowly beating Windows which had 37.91%. With data showing a consistent overall decline in PC sales, Windows’ backbone, over the last 5 years, this is expected to become the new normal as the world increasingly becomes mobile. Simply put, there were more people last month accessing the internet from their Android-powered smartphones than there were those doing so from their Windows machines as captured by the clever people over at StatCounter who track over 2.5 million websites globally to get a clear picture of what is going on.
This article penned by renowned American technology journalist Mike Elgan a few days ago pretty much sums up the arrival of mobile and the end of the road for the laptop/PC as we know it.
Steve Jobs might have prophesied the demise of the PC a while back as he marketed the iPad as its possible successor but he’d be shocked if he came back to life to find out that tablets aren’t fairing much better either and it is the smartphone that is largely responsible for the reversal in fortunes for the most common computing medium that man has known for nearly four decades. The best surprise of all? That it is the platform he sought to go “thermonuclear” on that is leading the charge.
With Microsoft “giving up” on its mobile ambitions and even throwing its hat in the ring with Android by way of embracing its apps platform (we have since lost count of the Android apps made by Microsoft and its Garage team) and even partnering with Android device makers like Samsung for things we’d never heard of before like “Microsoft Edition” smartphones, we can’t be more optimistic about the future prospects of the global dominance of our favourite platform.
Here’s to many more years of being a world beater. Go Android!
Note: just so we are clear, here‘s how StatCounter arrives at those numbers. Don’t shoot the messenger.
