Mobile operating system share of operating systems. However, variations occur in popularity by regions, while desktop-minority also applies on some days in regions such as United States and United Kingdom. Mobile operating system milestones mirror the development of mobile phones and smartphones: These operating systems often run atop baseband or other real time operating systems that handle hardware aspects of the phone. Android (based on the modified Linux kernel) is a mobile operating system developed by Google Inc. Besides having the largest installed base worldwide on smartphones, it is also the most popular operating system for general purpose computers (a category that includes
Usage share of operating systems Online usage of Linux kernel derivatives (Google systems + GNU/Linux) exceeds that of Windows. This has been true since some time between January and April 2016, according to W3Counter and StatCounter. But even before that, the figure for all Unix-like OSes, including those from Apple, was higher than that for Windows. Windows is still the dominant desktop OS, but the dominance varies by regions, has gradually lost market share to other desktop operating systems (not just to mobile) with the slide very noticeable in the US, where macOS has more than tripled, from yearly 2009 to 2017, with Windows there