More than 1 billion Android phones shipped in 2014

According to a new report from research firm Strategy Analytics, over one billion Android smartphones shipped in the year 2014. Now we’re not talking about Android devices as a whole, just smartphones. To be a bit more exact, the number is upwards 1,042,700,000 Android devices overall. That’s not even the craziest part. The total number of smartphones shipped in 2014 totaled 1.3 billion, which means Android smartphones made up roughly 81% of all smartphones sold last year. The total number of smartphones shipped in 2013 totaled one billion (781 million of those were Android handsets), so we’ve seen a 30% increase in total smartphone sales year over year. Strategy Analytics explains that Apple’s iOS platform remains the only “serious” threat to Android for now, which sold 193 million smartphones in 2014.

As you can see in the chart above, Android smartphones equated to about 81.2% of the market in 2014, iOS took up about 15%, Microsoft (Windows Phone) grabbing only around 3% of the market and the ‘other’ operating systems (BlackBerry, etc.) claiming only .7% in 2014. The research firm also explains:

Emerging markets, such as China and Indonesia, drove the industry’s growth last year and they will continue to do so through 2015.

So which Android phones and manufacturers were responsible for this massive growth? We reported about a month ago that Chinese OEMs (Xiaomi, OPPO, ZTE, HUAWEI, Meizu, and a few others) made up almost 40% of all smartphones shipped in 2014.