Mobile and Desktop Operating Systems Market Share

Have you ever wondered which is more popular – Windows or Mac OS?

Have you ever pondered who is winning in the Android vs iOS race for market share?

Have you ever thought about the value of Google Chromebook in the educational system?

If the answer to at least one of those questions is yes, you’ve come to the right place. I’ve got exactly the operating systems market share stats you need.

Windows 11 has a desktop market share of 71.44% among Windows systems, having overtaken Windows 10.
Windows 10 still accounts for 27.83% of Windows desktops.
0.05% of Windows PCs still run Windows XP.
Windows holds 76.36% of the desktop market, with Apple at about 16.8% combined.
The Linux desktop share is 4.54%.
69.17% of mobile devices run Android, against 30.81% for iOS.
Android 16 leads with 37.99% of Android devices, and iOS 26.6 leads with 56.61%.
Across every device type, Android is the world’s most used OS at 42.54%.

There we go.

Oh, you want more?

Then simply scroll down.

All the share figures on this page come from StatCounter, measured in September 2026. Two things are worth knowing before you read them.

First, StatCounter estimates share from page views on the sites it tracks, so it is a sample rather than a census, and it is revised. In mid-2026 a large share of desktop traffic was briefly misclassified as “Unknown”, which made Windows look like it had fallen below 60% and Linux look like it had surged. StatCounter corrected it. The figures below are the corrected ones.

Second, StatCounter lists “OS X” and “macOS” as separate rows because of how Apple reports user agents. Neither row on its own is Apple’s desktop share.

Windows

Windows held a 76.36% desktop market share in September 2026. (Source: StatCounter)
Windows 11 is now the most used version, on 71.44% of Windows desktops, having overtaken Windows 10. (Source: StatCounter)
Windows 10 still accounts for 27.83%, a substantial installed base given it is past end of support. (Source: StatCounter)
Windows 7 is down to 0.55%. (Source: StatCounter)
Windows 8.1 is on 0.09% and Windows 8 on 0.02%. (Source: StatCounter)
Windows XP still registers 0.05%, a quarter of a century after release. (Source: StatCounter)
Microsoft reported $331.8 billion in revenue for fiscal 2026, up 18% year over year. (Source: Microsoft)

Mac

Apple’s desktop share is split across two StatCounter rows: OS X at 10.68% and macOS at 6.1%, or about 16.8% combined, in September 2026. (Source: StatCounter)
The macOS version table is not usable as a guide to which release people run. StatCounter reports “macOS Catalina” at 73.92%, but notes on its own page that Apple incorrectly reports every macOS release since Catalina 10.15 as Catalina. That figure is a reporting artifact, not evidence that three quarters of Mac users are on a 2019 release. (Source: StatCounter)
The next largest entries are macOS 19 at 6.66% and macOS 15.7 at 3.19%. (Source: StatCounter)

Google Chrome OS

Chrome OS held a 2.31% desktop market share in September 2026. (Source: StatCounter)

Linux

Linux held a 4.54% desktop market share in September 2026. (Source: StatCounter)
That is a real rise from roughly 1.6% in 2019, though it is below the figures circulated during the mid-2026 misclassification. Our Linux statistics cover where else the kernel runs, including the web servers where its share is far larger.

Others

FreeBSD registers 0% on desktop. (Source: StatCounter)

The conclusion is unchanged in direction but not in scale: Windows has by far the highest desktop share, with Apple second at around 16.8% combined and Linux a distant but genuinely growing third.

Android

69.17% of mobile devices ran Android in September 2026. (Source: StatCounter)
Across all platforms, desktop and mobile together, Android is the single most used operating system in the world at 42.54%. (Source: StatCounter)
Android 16 is the leading version, on 37.99% of Android devices, having replaced Android 11 at the top. (Source: StatCounter)
Android 15 follows with 16.13%, then Android 14 at 11.95% and Android 13 at 11.67%. (Source: StatCounter)
Android 11 is now down to 6.14%. (Source: StatCounter)

iOS

iOS held 19.45% of the worldwide operating system market across all device types in September 2026. (Source: StatCounter)
Counting mobile only, iOS held 30.81%. (Source: StatCounter)
iOS 26.6 is the most used version, at 56.61%. (Source: StatCounter)
The version table carries a caveat of its own: StatCounter notes that Apple’s Safari anti-fingerprinting changes caused iOS 26.2 to be misreported as 18.7, which is why an apparently old release sits second at 10.19%. (Source: StatCounter)

The Android versus iOS race continues, and the gap on mobile is narrower than the all-platform numbers suggest: 69.17% against 30.81%. Our Android statistics go further into that side of it.

The Programmers’ Most Used

Developers do not use the same operating systems as everyone else, and Stack Overflow’s 2025 survey asked about work and personal use separately. These are the professional-use figures, where respondents could select more than one.

49.5% use Windows as a primary operating system for work. (Source: Stack Overflow, 2025)
32.9% use macOS, far above macOS’s share of desktops generally. (Source: Stack Overflow, 2025)
16.7% use Linux outside the Windows Subsystem for Linux, with a further 16.8% using WSL. (Source: Stack Overflow, 2025)
Counting named distributions separately, Ubuntu reaches 27.7% and Debian 10.4% for professional use. (Source: Stack Overflow, 2025)

The survey no longer breaks Windows down by version, so the old Windows 7 and Windows 10 developer figures on this page have no current equivalent and have been removed rather than approximated.

The headline is that developers run Apple hardware at roughly twice the rate of the general desktop population, and that Linux use among them, once WSL and the named distributions are counted, is far higher than its 4.54% desktop share would suggest.

The Game Developers’ Choice

80% of game developers worked on PC games in 2025. (Source: GDC State of the Game Industry)
16% were working on games for web browsers in 2025. (Source: GDC)
38% of developers were working on games for smartphones and tablets as of 2018. (Source: WePC)
7% of game developers were creating games for Linux as of 2018. (Source: WePC)

Note the change in category: the 2025 PC figure covers PC rather than the combined PC and Mac grouping used in the older survey, so it is not a direct replacement for the 53% this page used to cite. The 2018 figures are kept with their original year.

Final Top 3

So, time to answer the questions from the intro.

Between Windows and Mac, Windows is the clear winner on desktop share at 76.36% against roughly 16.8%. Among developers the picture is very different, with a third working primarily on macOS.

On mobile, Android leads at 69.17% to iOS at 30.81%, and Android is the most used operating system in the world across all device types. iOS retains its premium position on a far smaller number of device models.

One closing caution, since every share figure here comes from the same source. StatCounter measures page views, not devices, and it revises its data: the mid-2026 anomaly on this very dataset moved Windows by more than fifteen points before it was corrected. Treat these as well-sourced estimates with a margin, not as counts.