Android Overtakes Windows As World’s Most Popular Operating System

Today may mark an important milestone is how people access the internet.

For the first time, Android has overtaken Windows PC as the world’s most popular operating system, according to web analytics firm Statcounter. Android accounted for 37.93 percent of tracked internet activity in March 2017 — just beating out Windows at 37.91 percent. That may seem like a marginal difference, but it signals a sea change in how people are accessing the internet.

“This is a milestone is technology history and the end of an era,” Statcounter CEO Aodhan Cullen said. “It marks the end of Microsoft’s leadership worldwide of the OS market which it has held since the 1980s. It also represents a major breakthrough for Android which held just 2.4 percent of global internet usage share only five years ago.”

Android’s usage surge is due in no small part to the booming Asian smartphone market — smartphones dominate in China and India, the latter of which is expected to overtake the U.S. this year as the second largest market overall. In developing regions like Asia and Africa, a smartphone may be a person’s only way of accessing the internet — particularly if they don’t have the luxury of owning a personal computer. As Engadget’s Jon Fingas puts it, “smartphones are democratizing internet access in a way that isn’t practical for typically pricier, less essential computers.”

Windows is the still the top dog among the PC operating system market — with an 84 percent internet usage share last month. Still, traditional PC sales are declining overall — “Windows won the desktop war but the battlefield moved on,” Cullen said. The Windows Phone operating system, for example, barely took 1 percent of the mobile OS market share. macOS came in as a distant second, with 11.68 percent of the share.

In terms of mobile operating system market share, Android still dominated — with 71 percent of market share worldwide, compared to iOS’ 19.5 percent market share. Broken down by region, iOS dominated North America, Australia and parts of Europe, while Android was the clear winner in Africa, South America, Russia and Asia.

Interestingly, more people worldwide seem to be surfing the web using iPads than Android tablets — in the tablet OS market share, iOS took 65.83 percent of the share while Android only took 33 percent, according to Statcounter’s data.