Windows Phone slips into the Other category with less than 0.5% market share in India

Windows Phone’s share of smartphone sales has been in free-fall since Microsoft announced their retrenchment from the smartphone market a bit more than a year ago.

While all markets have been hit hard, the markets where Windows Phone has always been marginal has seen much of the hard-won gains by Nokia and the Lumia brand more or less wiped out.

Today Strategy Analytics reports that Android smartphones now own 97.1% of the Indian smartphone market, up from 90% a year ago.

The competition, iOS and Windows Phone, saw corresponding losses. iOS dropped from 4.5% to 2.4% of the market, selling only 0.8 million handsets. Windows Phone share has been more or less completely wiped out, now falling in the Other segment with less than o.5% market share.

India is currently the world’s third largest smartphone market, after China and the US. India is growing quickly due to low smartphone penetration rates, an expanding middle class with more disposable income, and intense competition among major vendors, retailers and operators.

Strategy Analytics note the smartphone market has grown 19% YoY but that Android dominated India and looked unbeatable right now, due to its “deep portfolio of hardware partners, extensive distribution channels, and a wide range of low-cost apps like Gmail.”

With even Apple having difficulty competing, Microsoft’s new strategy of building on Google’s ecosystem with its own range of productivity apps and solutions appears to be the only reasonable way forward, at least until Continuum becomes powerful and cheap enough to offer a compelling selling point.

Do our readers agree? Let us know below.