This Chart Reveals a Surprising Fact You Probably Didn’t Know About Apple iPhones

Here’s something I bet you didn’t know: the Apple iPhone accounts for only a small portion of global mobile phone sales.

Sure, Apple has sold millions of iPhone units every year since Q4 2011. But, again, that’s only a fraction of total global phone sales, according to historical data from Gartner and MobileWorld.org.

Check out this graph by MobileUnlocked.com:

Screen grab.

Also, look at how Samsung has performed over the years. They apparently subscribe to the “slow and steady wins the race” mentality.

“We tend to think of Samsung and Apple as being equal competitors today in that the two companies are perpetually locked in a war over patents,” the Washington Post’s Brian Fung points out.

However, as the above chart notes, the two tech giants have achieved market prominence via very different routes.

Also, it’s interesting to see how closely Google’s approach to the mobile market resembles the Samsung strategy. And it’s paying off: Google’s Android OS is installed on roughly 80 percent of the world’s smartphones, while Apple’s iOS accounts for only 13 percent.

In order to catch up to other tech providers, Apple is expected to release a stripped down, low-cost iPhone “5C” sometime later this year.

But what about the chart's “others” category?

Fung explains:

…[the] “others” category ... captures tiny, white-box devices. In 2010, these small-time manufacturers serving Latin America, Russia, India and other developing markets pushed sales of “other” devices to 33 percent of world market share.

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Follow Becket Adams (@BecketAdams) on Twitter

This post's headline has been updated. "Har-har" to the commenters.

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