Android's Rise to Smartphone Dominance

Ten years ago, on September 23, 2008, the T-Mobile G1 made its debut, marking the birth hour of Android. More than a year after Apple had released the first iPhone, Android’s debut wasn’t as spectacular and, as opposed to the iPhone, the first Android device still had a physical keyboard. But Google’s open approach to building a mobile platform quickly proved to be successful and it took less than three years for Android to become the number 1 platform in the booming smartphone market.

As the following chart illustrates, much of the smartphone market’s exponential growth over the past decade was driven by Android devices, with sales surpassing one billion for the first time in 2014. According to Gartner, worldwide sales of Android smartphones amounted to 1.3 billion units last year, which is equivalent to 86 percent market share for Google’s mobile operating system.