Microsoft Windows Phone to remain an also-ran in Android dominated smartphone market - IDC

IDC forecasts continuing market-meh for Microsoft's flagship mobile operating system

Analyst group IDC's latest smartphone operating system forecasts suggest that the market will be dominated by Android in the four years to 2020, with Apple's iOS also losing ground in market-share terms.

Windows Phone, meanwhile, despite bullish forecasts when it was released in 2010, will not even break five per cent of the market, according to IDC.

It follows a year in which sales of Windows Phone devices - which are predominantly focused on the low-end of the market - fell by 10.2 per cent, according to IDC, despite the successful July launch of Windows 10, which had been expected to give a push to Windows Phone device sales with a subsequent launch of the Windows 10 Mobile platform.

Unfortunately, Windows 10 Mobile has only 'soft launched' at best, with just two flagship phones - the Lumia 950 and 950 XL - currently appearing to show the new platform off, and many existing Lumia devices proving incompatible with it.

Instead of bringing its mobile phone efforts in line with Windows 10's swift uptake, Microsoft has seen sales of Windows Phone suffer as more capable Android devices become cheaper and cheaper.

"Despite all the effort Microsoft has put into the launch of Windows 10, IDC does not expect Microsoft's share of the smartphone OS market to grow much over the coming years," declared IDC.

It continued: "In 2015, IDC expects the average selling price of Windows Phones to be $148, which is $71 lower than Android's average selling price of $219. This was brought about by Microsoft's push into the low-end mass market.

"While this approach helped drive shipments up to 34.9 million units in 2014, IDC is forecasting a year-over-year decline of -10.2 per cent in 2015, followed by further decline in 2016. The weak results can largely be attributed to the lack of OEM partner support."

In other words, as capable Android devices have come down in price, Microsoft has lost out, according to IDC's analysis.

"IDC believes the proliferation of the core Android platform will continue with huge efforts being put forth by companies like Cyanogen and Xiaomi to differentiate themselves from their competitors. Given its global footprint and application/services ecosystem, IDC fully expects some form of Android to hold a dominant share of the smartphone OS space for the foreseeable future.

The forecasts from 2015 to the end of 2019 were published in IDC's latest Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, which tracks unit sales rather than revenues.

While Android devices are expected to total 1.16 billion units this year, that figure will rise to more than 1.5 billion in 2019. Apple iOS device sales, meanwhile, will rise more marginally, from 226 million to 263.4 million. Windows Phone, meanwhile, will exhibit growth, but only from a low point of 31.3 million units in 2015 to 43.6 million units in 2019.

Microsoft doesn't seem to be pinning too many future hopes on Windows 10 Mobile as a platform either, revealing last week that it intends to support the largely unlaunched OS only until 9 January 2018.