Top 10 Most Popular Operating System Market Share Worldwide 2009 to 2020

The usage share of operating systems is the percentage of computing devices that run each operating system at any particular time. All such figures are necessarily estimates because data about operating system share is difficult to obtain; there are few reliable primary sources – and no agreed methodologies for its collection.

In the personal computing platform area of smartphones and watches Google's Android dominates with over 2.5 billion users. Other mobile phone operating systems include Apple's iOS, KaiOS and Series 30+.

In the area of desktop and laptop computers, Microsoft Windows is generally above 70% in most markets and at 77% globally, Apple's macOS at around 13%, Google's ChromeOS at about 6% (in the US) and Linux at around 2%. All these figures vary somewhat in different markets, and depending on how they are gathered.

Android is more popular than Windows globally; has battled Windows for the most-used rank with them switching sides, but currently has 15% more use (or over 5-percent point difference). On a global scale, iOS has never managed close to half the popularity of Windows; however, mobile operating systems (Android plus iOS) have majority use (in most populous countries, even including the United States, where iOS alone is more popular than Windows over non-mobile (Windows and e.g. macOS), and had for close to two years, mostly because Android was and continues to be more popular than Windows. There are still countries and continents where mobile devices have never been anywhere near that popular while on all continents some countries have become mobile-majority and still are, including Ireland (where for a while iOS alone was more popular than Windows, and later Android alone in Europe; the most populous countries and most populous continent, Asia as a whole (e.g. China and India; excluding e.g. Russia), is still mobile-majority at 56.37%.