Windows has been the reigning OS for decades, since the 1980s to be specific. It took over the desktop and laptop market by a huge margin and left the other competing rivals fighting for scraps. But with the rise of smartphones, and the decline of desktop usage, the company started a downward trend. Their counter OS, Windows Phone, did not do well , it only holds 1% of the market.
According to a report released by StatCounter, the Windows supremacy as the end user OS of choice has been knocked down by Android. Fortunately, it has only been beaten by a small margin which they can recover if they play their cards well. According to the report, Android end user market share stands at 37.93% while that of Windows is at 37.91% worldwide. This 0.2% difference is within the error margin of such statistics. However, StatCounter defends its report by stating that they based their findings on 2.5 million websites which generate over 15 billion page views.
Despite such a solid backing, the federal government’s Digital Analytics Program (DAP) disagrees with the report stating that they did their own research by tracking over 2.5 billion web visits across 5,000 government websites and found out that Windows is still the king amongst end users. According to DAP, Windows holds 49.2 % of the market, followed by Apple’s iOS which has 23.4% and lastly Android holds only 18.6 %.
It is important to note that the findings by DAP were based on the US government websites so it is safe to conclude that the results only cover users from that country alone, on the other hand, the StatCounter’s report was spanning across websites used by people worldwide.
In summary, Windows is still on the lead amongst end users in the US but it is at second place worldwide. What all researchers agree on is that Windows has been declining in usage over the years as many people can get their needs covered by smartphones and tablets running Android or iOS.