We use a plethora of digital devices on a daily basis, from mobile phones, personal computers, laptops, smart TVs, smart watches, to embedded systems such as the car computer, product scanners, POS, to the digital services such as social media powered by servers located in remote data-centers.
But have you really wondered what is the OS that powers all these devices? The answer is, there is not such an operating system, as each device category is powered by a different family of operating systems. But first, we should split them into categories:
1) Mobile phones
Mobile phones are devices that first appeared around 30 years ago, but only for the rich and powerful at first. They entered mainstream usage after the year 2000, with the all-powerful Nokia dumb phone.
But even though they are a recent addition, they have become the most used digital device on the planet today, with a total of 7.2 billion mobile phones worldwide, surpassing the total number of people on the planet and making it the fastest expanding human-made invention ever, from 0 to 7 billion in less than 30 years. On the majority of dumb phones, that is, non-smartphones, a JAVA OS that runs on an embedded system is used. Newer versions of the phones use a stripped down Linux version, Symbian OS and the Blackberry OS.
The most used mobile device in existence today is the smartphone, first being launched around 2007 and already reaching a staggering 2.5 billion devices built in more than 10 years.
The lion’s share on smartphones is taken by Android, a family of operating systems developed by Google on a modified version of the Linux kernel. Android has a market share usage of over 85%, being installed on the majority of smartphones in existence. Apple’s iOS has a market share of 14%, which is exclusively installed only on the iPhone family of mobile phones.
2) Personal computers
When it comes to personal computers, such as laptops and tower computer, Windows has the lead, being installed on 82% of the computers used today for personal or business use. This is followed by MacOSX, with 12%, again being installed exclusively on the devices launched by Apple, such as the iMac and MacBook. The rest of the devices that are being used as personal computers are installed with a wide variety of operating systems, such as Linux Desktop distributions, ChromeOS, and others.
3) Industrial computers
When talking about industrial devices, such as servers, embedded systems for manufacturing purposes, car constructions and other devices, security, reliability, and stability are the most important characteristics. This is why Windows and Android can’t be used in this environment, where some machines may run up to 20 years or more without a single reboot.
The public servers that host the Internet services and apps we use daily run on Unix derived operating systems, with a market share of 98%. Linux has the largest market share with over 96% of servers today running a Linux distribution. The top500 fastest supercomputers today run Linux exclusively, being the only market that has 100% domination of a single operating system.
Conclusion
As we can see, there are many different types of operating system, each catering to different devices and usage, and that is unlikely to change anytime soon.