Android beats ios in tablet market share

                            The iPad is no longer the infallible tablet king that it used to be, even just a year ago.

It wasn't long ago that the iPad was unquestionably the leader in the tablet market -- if not the entire market itself.

But the Android ecosystem has proven that it could catch up, thanks especially to entries that have debuted in the last two years -- namely Amazon's Kindle Fire brand and Google's ownNexus 7 series built with mobile OEM partners.

As further evidence of that, Strategy Analytics has published its second-quarter report for global tablet shipments.

The market intelligence firm found that Android accounted for 67 percent of worldwide shipments in the second quarter of 2013. Both iOS and Windows declined to 28 percent and 4.5 percent of the global market share, respectively.

The total number of shipments came close to approximately 51.7 million units, up from 36.1 million units during the same quarter last year.

While attributing Android's success to a more stable collective of hardware partners, Strategy Analytics' director of tablets coverage Peter King tried to put Apple's quarter into better perspective:

 Apple iOS shipments were 14.6 million iPads in Q2 2013 which declined 14 percent annually. In the same quarter a year ago the first Retina display iPads were launched which could partly explain the decline as there were no new models in this quarter. However, to compensate that, iPad Mini which was not available a year ago, now freely available was expected to take the figure higher than 14.6 million.

Strategy Analytics subscribers can download the entire report now. Otherwise, it costs $6,999 for individual purchase.