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
Windows Phone 8 WP8, Kantar reported in October 2013 that Windows Phone grew its market share substantially to 4.8% in the United States and 10.2% in Europe. Similar statistics from Gartner for Q3 2013 indicated that Windows Phone's global market share increased 123% from the same period in 2012 to 3.6%. In Q1 2014 IDC reported that global market share of Windows Phone has dropped to 2.7%. Windows Phone 8 Windows Phone 8 is the second generation of the Windows Phone mobile operating system from Microsoft. It was released on October 29, 2012, and like its predecessor, it features a flat user interface