While much ado has been made about Android’s rise to prominence, there still remains a large hill for the operating system to climb when it comes to overall usage. When all is said and done, worldwide there are two dominant smartphone operating systems: iOS and Symbian.

Uptime monitoring service Pingdom has put together market share statistics based on Web usage it compiled from  analytics firm StatCounter. What it shows is a world divided–with Symbian nearly surrounded by iOS to the west and east.

Symbian’s biggest market is the African continent, where it holds about 75 percent shre. It is also iOS’ weakest: about 2 percent of Web traffic comes from iPhones. Symbian also holds commanding market share in Asia and South America, with just over 50 percent  share in both cases.

Conversely, iOS’ best market is Oceania, where it has just over 70 percent of the market, and in Europe it holds around 45 percent of the market. in the US, while facing a surging Android, it still accounts for over a third of all web traffic. The US is also Symbian’s worst market, no doubt due to Nokia’s weak position here in the country.

Android fans can take comfort that in at least one country the OS is used by a majority of smar phones, and that’s South Korea at just over 78 percent. But the next closest country is Austria, but only with a 28 percent share of Web traffic. Still a long way to go.

Blackberry leads in four countries, iOS leads in 30 countries–generally in Europe, and Symbian in more than 100. No doubt the fact that Symbian smartphones generally are inexpensive, and thus a smash hit in developing countries, is driving this overwhelming success.

 
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