Android and iOS claim a combined 96.3 percent share of smartphone market

ANDROID AND IOS accounted for a combined 96.3 percent of the smartphone market in 2014, squeezing out rivals Windows Phone and BlackBerry.

That's according to the latest figures from IDC, which show that the smartphone market is increasingly a two-horse race.

Android continues to dominate, claiming 81.5 percent of the global market in 2014 and shipping more than one billion smartphones during the 12-month period.

Android's share is up from 78.7 percent the previous year, thanks largely to the emergence of smaller vendors and cheaper devices, according to IDC.

The analyst outfit noted that Samsung didn't do much to push the software to growth in the past year, probably owing to stalling sales of the Galaxy S5.

Ramon Llamas, research manager at IDC, said: "Samsung experienced flat growth in 2014, forcing Android to rely more heavily on smaller vendors to drive volumes higher."

Analyst outfit Kantar Worldpanel ComTech revealed last month that Apple accounted for a record 42.5 percent of smartphone sales in the UK during November, but IDC's figures indicate that the firm didn't do quite so well globally.

The numbers show that the iPhone accounted for 14.8 percent of the global smartphone market in 2014, down from 15.1 percent the previous year.

Still, the firm isn't having too much of a tough time when compared with Windows Phone and BlackBerry.

IDC's figures show that Microsoft's mobile operating system accounted for a mere 2.7 percent of the market in 2014, with sales of 34.9 million Lumia smartphones during the 12-month period.

BlackBerry claimed a mere 0.4 percent during the same period, shipping just 5.8 million devices in 2014.

Further figures released by eMarketer today show that BlackBerry is doing a little better in the UK, where it claimed 1.9 percent of the mobile market.

Melissa Chau, senior research manager at IDC, said: "Instead of a battle for the third ecosystem after Android and iOS, 2014 instead yielded skirmishes, with Windows Phone edging out BlackBerry, Firefox, Sailfish and the rest, but without any of these platforms making the kind of gains needed to challenge the top two."