Although Africa has always been “behind” in technological aspects, it’s a big continent with 49 states and it’s slowly catching up to the rest of the world so both desktop and mobile operating systems have been interested for quite a while now. In fact, Africa can be considered the world’s new economic frontier, with globalisation reaching it at last after Asia and Latin America. The continent attracts foreign investors and with more than 1,050 million people (15% of the world’s population) it’s clearly the new rising market. So what operating systems are in control (or dominating) the African market right now? Lets find out.
Mobile OS
Africa is the fastest-growing mobile market in the world with the number of suscribers increasing 20% every year. This is an outstanding growing rate, and nowhere in the whole planet do the figures even come close. So with around 735,000,000 mobiles in the country this is obviously an important market for operating systems. Are Studies show that on the whole, although Africans prefer Android (with a little more than 30% of the total market share) over Apple’s iOS (with 23.72%), statistics when it comes to mobile OS in the African continent are similar to those in most countries in the world. After the two big operating system manufacturers come Series 40 (with 15% of the market share), Symbian OS (with nearly 12%), Samsung’s OS (with 6.72),and finally RIM’s Blackberry OS (with 4.3% of the market share).
I just want to make a point on Nokia’s importance in Africa. If we add up both of Nokia’s OS (Series 40 and Symbian) they account for 26% of the African market share, which means a higher presence than all of the other companies (including Apple) except Android.
PC OS
When it comes to desktop operating systems, after Windows XP ruling for ages, it now accounts for 41.97% of the African market share and has recently been overtaken by Windows 7 with a little more than 49% of the market share, so it no longer tops the OS rank in Africa.
There’s really no surprises here and just like in most of the world Windows has hardly no competition, with Windows Vista being the third most used OS, and the first competitor, Apple, accounting for only roughly 4% (combining both Mac OSX and iOS).
