Smartphone touchscreen device with a slide-out physical keyboard. The first Android device, the HTC Dream, was released in September 2008. Although Android's adoption was relatively slow at first, it started gaining widespread popularity in 2010, and in early 2012 dominated the smartphone market share worldwide, which continues to this day. Android and iPhone devices popularized the smartphone form factor based on a large capacitive touchscreen, and led to the decline of earlier, keyboard- and keypad-focused platforms. Microsoft, for instance, discontinued Windows Mobile and started a new touchscreen-oriented OS from scratch, called Windows Phone. Nokia abandoned Symbian and partnered with Microsoft to
Relative market share cancels out. Relative market share Relative market share indexes a firm’s or a brand’s market share against that of its leading competitor. Market concentration, a related metric, measures the degree to which a comparatively small number of firms accounts for a large proportion of the market. These metrics are useful in comparing a firm’s or a brand’s relative position across different markets and in evaluating the type and degree of competition in those markets. The purpose of the “relative market share metric” is to access a firm’s or a brand’s success and its position in the market. A firm with