Gartner: Windows Phone market share is at 1.7 per cent

Gartner's latest study says that Windows Phone has less than 2 per cent of the market share right now as it falls way behind iOS and Android. To be precise, Windows Phone devices count for 1.7 per cent of smartphone in the market today, down from 3 percent market share a year ago. It's pretty much over, folks. How can a so called platform this small entice developers to keep plugging away?

What has changed in the past few years with Windows Phone? Despite starting out a few years ago with a sizeable number of OEMs (counting LG, Samsung, HTC, Dell and Nokia), Microsoft handsets running Windows Phone these past two year have been Nokia devices and mostly budget-focused devices.

Microsoft bought Nokia and ground it up into little pieces until the once proud Finnish phone icon ceased to exist in any shape or form, at least in the handset space. Microsoft's shambolic handling of Windows Phone and the fact that no exciting new hardware has shipped have all contributed to the loss of not just market share but the interest of consumers.

“Despite the announcement of Windows 10, we expect Windows smartphone market share will continue to be a small portion of the overall smartphone OS market as consumers remain attracted by competing ecosystems,” Gartner research director Roberta Cozza says. “Microsoft smartphones will mainly focus on driving value for enterprise users.”