Gartner just released their report on the worldwide mobile phone sales in Q2 of this year. In this quarter, close to 41 million smartphones were sold. This is a 27% increase year over year, compared to a 6% decline for non-smartphones.
Below the number of sold smartphones per manufacturer are displayed:

Source: Gartner
Apple shows the largest growth with the release of the iPhone 3GS, with a market share of 13% of all worldwide smartphone sales in Q2. In total, 41 million smartphones were sold in Q2, but how many of their buyers have access to an app store on their phone?
If we look at the specific manufacturers:
- Nokia: the Ovi Store supports nearly all Nokia smartphones, but is only pre-installed on the N97, with newer models to follow. The N97 was sold 500k times. So while the store is available for the main part of their 18 million customers, it is challenging to predict which part actually downloaded the Ovi Store on their phone, besides the 500k N97 customers.
- Research in Motion: Blackberry App World supports the new models that were sold the last quarter. But like Nokia, it is not pre-installed on the devices yet. Next, App World has just been rolled out in Europe, so the reach of the store during Q2 was limited to US, UK and Canada.
- Apple: the Apple App Store is present on all in Q2 sold iPhones.
- HTC: 3 out of 25 HTC models are Android based and have Android Market pre-installed. In Q2, HTC was the only major manufacturer with Android phones. Gartner says Android has 2% of smartphone OS share, which translates to 800k phones. The other HTC models are Windows Mobile based, with Windows Marketplace not launched yet.
- Fujitsu: has no app store yet.
- Others: the only included manufacturer with an app store is Palm. According Gartner, 200k Palm Pre’s were sold, on which the Palm App Catalog is pre-installed.
Adding the total number of consumers that have access to an app store on the device: 500k (Nokia N97) + 5.4M (Apple) + 800k (HTC) + 200k (Palm) = 6.9M. This number is worst-case, because consumers with a Blackberry or Nokia smartphone that manually installed their app store are excluded.
With smartphones quickly gaining market share, it will be very interesting to see how the total number of app store supported phones will develop.