Top Mobile Operating Systems That Are Leading The Market

You may have used many mobile devices from many different companies, but today we will tell you something about their operating systems and what’s running them. You may find it interesting that there are so many unknown mobiles OS in the market and how they run your smooth smartphone and the glossy touchscreens.

In this article, I'll talk about the most important mobile operating systems, their current state, and how they're performing in the current mobile landscape.

In the later half of September 2008, Android OS was released by Google. The naming convention of Android OS updates has been alphabetic till now. Names that are based on food items and delicious desserts, sweets like – Cupcake, Donut, Eclair, Froyo, Gingerbread, Honeycomb, Ice Cream Sandwich, Jelly Bean, KitKat, Lollipop. Google made this operating system on the open source platform and hence made it possible to have the largest number of apps in their Play Store.

Android from the first day was quite promising and had some great looking interfaces and it made it possible to gain huge popularity in no time. Google Play is one of the biggest repositories of Apps for mobile devices and has millions of apps. It has been a serious threat for iOS.

Smartphones like HTC, Samsung and Motorola have incorporated Android as their primary OS and they have gained tremendous success with them.

Symbian OS is officially the property of Nokia. It means that any other company will have to take permission from Nokia before using this operating system. Nokia has remained a giant in low-end mobile market, so after Java symbian was the most used in the mobile phones till a couple of years ago. Still Symbian is widely used in low-end phones but the demand rate has ben continuously decreasing. By upgrading Symbian mobile OS, Nokia has made it capable to run smartphones efficiently. Symbian ANNA and BELLE are the two latest updates which are currently used in Nokia’s smartphones. Overall, the Symbian OS is excellently designed and is very user-friendly. Unfortunately, Symbian OS graph is going downwards nowadays due to the immense popularity of Android and iOS.

Some of the phones currently running on Symbian OS are Nokia C6-01, Nokia 603, Nokia 700, Nokia 808 Pure View, Nokia E6 (ANNA) and Nokia 701 (BELLE). Symbian is a popular choice among nokia dual sim mobile phones as well.

Even though Apple's mobile operating system has recently been losing ground to Android, it continues to be a major player in the mobile space. Currently, iOS has a market share of around 13%. iOS is based on Unix and native applications are mostly written in Objective-C, a strict superset of the C programming language. Compared to Google's Play Store, it is a little bit costlier and harder to get an application in Apple's walled App Store. Developers need to pay $99 per year to enroll in Apple's developer program.

The approval process for the App Store is notoriously strict. As with Google's Play Store, competition is fierce in the App Store with more than 1 million applications to date.

Windows Phone is a proprietary mobile operating system developed by Microsoft. Windows Phone introduced a new design language, previously called Metro UI, but later renamed to simply Modern. Microsoft licenses the software to third-party hardware manufacturers, but keeps a stringent list of minimum requirements for the hardware it runs on to ensure the best user experience.

In 2011 Nokia announced it has chosen Windows Phone as the OS for all its future smartphones providing a solid backing for the fledgling OS and in the same time betting all of its mobile phone business on its success.

The BlackBerry operating system used to rock the enterprise, but now that consumer devices are the standard, admins have to decide if they will stay loyal to RIM or not.The BlackBerry operating system has fallen out of favor among consumers, raising the question of whether IT pros should remain loyal to Research In Motion.

Research In Motion (RIM) was built with secure enterprise access in mind, and the company began its rise when it enabled wireless email outside the firewall. Special software that plugs into popular email systems, such as Microsoft Exchange and Lotus Notes, combined with the BlackBerry operating system  to make RIM the enterprise standard.

But the rise of touchscreen smartphones, such as the iPhone and Android devices, has sent RIM’s market share plummeting, even among business users. The security and reliability of RIM’s devices, software and network were once the glue that bound the company and the enterprise. But new consumer devices, mobile device management (MDM) options and recent issues with RIM’s network might lead IT to cut the cord.

Sailfish OS is a Linux-based general-purpose operating system, widely known as a mobile operating system combining the Linux kernel for a particular hardware platform use, the open source Mer core middleware, the proprietary UI contributed by Jolla, and other third party components some of which are free software, and others of which are proprietary.

Sailfish is being developed by Jolla in permanent cooperation with the Sailfish community (which in open model makes development requests and decides development priorities in voting), the Mer project and its community (open source project contributing middleware for Jolla which also is active Mer project contributor, what assures compatibility of both projects with established standard), corporate members of the Sailfish Alliance and various open community members.

Just over a month after Firefox OS arrived in South Africa, Mozilla launched a device running its open source mobile OS in other parts of Africa, too. Dubbed Orange Klif, the 3G device runs on Orange's mobile network, and was made available for purchase in Senegal and Madagascar this past week.

“We are pleased to partner with Orange to bring the mobile Web to users in a substantial number of new growth markets across Africa and the Middle East," said Mozilla CTO Andreas Gal. “I’m also thrilled to see how the imminent arrival of Firefox OS has created excitement in the local Mozilla communities.”

Tizen has been in development for years. We saw some phones running it at Mobile World Congress in Barcelona in February, where Samung also announced the Tizen-powered Samsung Gear 2 and Gear 2 Neo. Finally Samsung has launched the world's first Tizen OS smartphone in Russia — the Samsung Z.

Up until now Samsung has been using Google's Android OS to run its range of Galaxy smartphones and tablets. However, the Korean manufacturer has confirmed its intent to go it alone, offering an alternative to Google’s mobile OS, iOS and Windows Phone.

So how does Tizen differ from Android? Here’s six things we know so far about the operating system that joins Firefox OS, Jolla Sailfish and Ubuntu Touch in the bid to shake things up. We were quite impressed by Tizen.