Though, the market and majority of Tablet makers are leaning towards the Android, Apple’s iOS will be able to retain its top position as leading operating system in Tablet market till 2015. Apple’s iOS will own more than half of tablet OSs market share for the next three years.
As per the Gartner, Apple will dominate the tablet OS market till 2015 despite of steady year-on-year decline. iOS market share is expected to reach from 83% of overall Tablet OS market share in 2010 to 47% by 2015. However, Android OS will double its tablet market share from 14% to 38% during the same duration.
“Seeing the response from both consumers and enterprises to the iPad, many vendors are trying to compete by first delivering on hardware and then trying to leverage the platform ecosystem,” said Carolina Milanesi, research vice president at Gartner. “Many, however, are making the same mistake that was made in the first response wave to the iPhone, as they are prioritizing hardware features over applications, services and overall user experience. Tablets will be much more dependent on the latter than smartphones have been, and the sooner vendors realize that the better chance they have to compete head-to-head with Apple.”
The reason behind Android failure to overtake iOS in tablet market shortly is probably the late introduction of Tablet specific operation system – Android 3.0 – also known as Honeycomb. Analysts said Google’s decision not to open up the Honeycomb, its first OS version dedicated to tablets, to third parties will prevent fragmentation, but it will also slow the price decline and ultimately cap market share.
On the other hand, BlackBerry (RIM) tablet OS QNX market share is yet to reach any market share valuation. It’s expected to capture 5.6% of Tablet Oss market share in 2011 and to double its share by 2015. Mostly, it will be Blackberry mobile users who will adopt the Blackberry Tablet only to have seamless synchronization between mobile and tablet.
Few other tablets OSs like MeeGo and WebOS will have marginal contribution in overall tablet OS market share by 2015. Gartner’s detail forecast is available in the report “Forecast: Media Tablets by Open Operating System, Worldwide, 2008-2015.”, which can be downloaded from here.