Android runs on 34.9% of the devices that connect to the web, more than any other operating system. That is the December 2025 estimate. Windows follows at 29.98%, then iOS at 16.81%, macOS at 2.03%, and all other systems together at 9.06%.
Treat the figures as estimates. Reliable primary sources are scarce and nobody has agreed on a standard way to collect the data. Still, the split by device type is clear enough.
Phones, tablets and desktops
On smartphones and other mobile devices, Android carries 72% of traffic and Apple’s iOS 28%. Tablets are the exception. There Apple’s iPadOS, a variant of iOS, leads with 51.23% worldwide, and Android has 48.61%.
On desktops and laptops, Windows holds 62.16% as of June 2026. Unknown operating systems come next at 18.75%, then Mac OS at 14.58%, desktop Linux at 3.09% and Google’s ChromeOS at 1.42%.
Servers and supercomputers
Out of sight, Linux dominates. It leads the server market with a 63.1% share, ahead of Windows, Unix and others. Every one of the 500 most powerful supercomputers has run Linux since November 2017.
Embedded systems are the most numerous devices of all, yet many have no operating system, or no web browser, so their share is hard to measure. Modern Intel microprocessors, for instance, contain an embedded management processor that runs a version of Minix.
Shipments, and who is shrinking
Shipment figures count units sent to stores, not sales to consumers, so they can mislead. Smartphones outsell PCs by units and by dollar value, and the gap was projected to grow to well over double.
On January 27, 2016, a day after Apple announced one billion devices, analyst Paul Thurrott compared the big three platforms. Apple’s active installed base was a billion. Microsoft had said 200 million for Windows 10 and 1.5 billion active users for Windows overall, a number that hadn’t moved in years. Google put Android above 1.4 billion as of September. “Only one of them is actually declining,” Thurrott wrote.
Apple stopped revealing unit sales in 2018 and now publishes only revenue by device model. Analysts work backward from wholesale prices. Most other hardware makers don’t report units either.
Recent PC shipments have been uneven. Gartner said worldwide PC shipments fell 16.2% in 2022, the largest annual drop since the mid-1990s. In 2024 and 2025, as Microsoft ended support for Windows 10 and many buyers resisted Windows 11’s hardware requirements, fewer PCs shipped with Windows preinstalled. macOS shipments rose 14.9% year over year in the third quarter of 2025, while PC shipments overall rose 8.1%.
Huawei added a third phone platform. Its Mate 70 went on sale in November 2024 with HarmonyOS NEXT, and since 2025 all new Huawei devices have shipped with it exclusively.
