Android and iOS accounted for 96.3% of all smartphone shipments in the fourth quarter as well as for all of 2014, up slightly from 95.6% in the fourth quarter of 2013 and from 93.8% a year earlier, according to IDC.

Shipments of Android devices grew 32% on year to 1.059 billion units in 2014, accounting for a 81.5% share compared to 78.7% a year earlier.

Samsung Electronics retained the leadership position by a wide margin for Android devices, shipping more volume than the next five vendors combined. At the same time, Samsung's total volumes for the year remained essentially flat while Asia-based vendors including Huawei, Lenovo (including Motorola), LG Electronics, Xiaomi, and ZTE fueled the most growth for Google's platform.

Shipments of iOS models were up 25.6% to 192.7 million units in 2014 although its market share edged down to 14.8% from the previous 15.1%.

Windows Phone saw its market share decline to 2.7% in 2014 compared 3.3% a year earlier despite an increase of 4.2% in 2014 shipments to 34.9 million units.

BlackBerry posted the only on-year shipment decline among the leading operating systems, falling 69.8% to 5.8 million units in 2014 and saw its market share slipping to 0.4% from the previous 1.9%.