New research out from Gartner and IDC predict the market share for Windows Phone will jump from roughly 4.3% today to more than 20% by 2015 — effectively putting it in second place behind Android, and ahead of iOS in third place.
While this sounds like a stretch, analysts have been somewhat surprised by how much share Microsoft’s mobile platform has been able to snag recently. Windows Phone head of marketing Achim Berg said yesterday that the road to such success starts in Europe, with the launch of the HTC Radar and Titan on October 1. Microsoft has even hired “hundreds of salesman” to help demonstrate the power of its newly refreshed platform, and plans to target women and young people to nab that 20 percent share.
For Windows Phone to see so much growth, Android and iOS will need to witness much slower growth. In fact, according to Gartner, Apple’s iOS will be the one to do so, growing from a 16 percent market share in 2010 to just 17 percent in 2015. Meanwhile, Android is poised to maintain control with growth from a 23 percent share in 2010 to a massive 49 percent in 2015, according to a recent Bloomberg report.
Regardless of predictions, two main elements will be key to the growth of Windows Phone; the selection of available apps and the handsets it runs on. What made Android what it is today is the fact that it’s available on so many devices. Microsoft looks to be following the same path, but it has a lot of catching up to do. On the app front, it also has a long way to go to catch up to Apple’s 425K+ available apps.
