The smartphone market share order shifted in the second quarter of 2026, and the story is not a happy one for Android’s biggest volume sellers. According to a new report from market research firm Omdia, Samsung held on to the number one spot worldwide and grew its share — but three of the largest Android brands, Xiaomi, OPPO, and vivo, all lost ground in the same three months, squeezed by a global memory-chip crisis that is making budget and mid-range phones more expensive to build.
Global smartphone shipments fell 4% year-on-year in Q2 2026 (April to June) compared with the same quarter a year ago. Omdia pins the decline on an ongoing shortage of memory chips — the DRAM and NAND storage that goes into every phone — which has driven component costs up across the industry. The pain is not spread evenly: it lands hardest on cheap phones, and therefore hardest on the vendors and buyers who depend on them.
Why the memory crisis is reshaping Android market share
Memory and storage now account for more than 60% of the bill-of-materials cost on a budget smartphone (under $400), and over 30% even on a flagship, per Omdia. That is a dramatic shift in a phone’s cost structure. When more than half the parts bill on an affordable phone is tied to a component that has suddenly got scarce and pricey, the sub-$400 mass market — the backbone of sales in India and much of the world — is where the squeeze is worst.
“The steepest volume drops hit the sub-$400 mass market segment, where supply constraints are tightest, profit margins are slimmest, and price sensitivity is highest,” said Runar Bjorhovde, Principal Analyst at Omdia. Le Xuan Chiew, Research Manager at Omdia, echoed the point that supply is tightest precisely in the budget tier — the part of the market with the least room to absorb a cost shock.
Samsung, Apple, Xiaomi, OPPO, vivo: the Q2 2026 numbers
Here is how global unit-shipment share moved between Q2 2025 and Q2 2026, per Omdia:
- Samsung: 22% (up from 20%) — up 2 points, still the world’s number one vendor.
- Apple: 20% (up from 16%) — up 4 points, its strongest Q2 on record.
- Xiaomi: 11% (down from 15%) — down 4 points, the single biggest decliner of any major vendor.
- OPPO: 10% (down from 12%) — down 2 points.
- vivo: 8% (down from 9%) — down 1 point.
- Everyone else combined: roughly 29% in both years — little net change.
The split is stark. The 3rd, 4th, and 5th-ranked vendors in the world — Xiaomi, OPPO, and vivo, all Android, all heavyweights in India — each shed share, while only the top two gained. Because the “others” bucket barely moved, this was not a broad reshuffle across the whole field but a concentrated hit on the three brands most exposed to budget and mid-range pricing. It was a “haves versus have-nots” quarter: the vendors with the most pricing power gained, and the volume-driven Chinese Android brands paid for it.
Why Xiaomi, OPPO, and vivo took the hit
Samsung’s gain came from a mix of resilient demand and strong supply-chain management, plus the delayed Galaxy S26 launch pushing some premium demand into Q2. Notably, Omdia also credits “modestly pricier” additions to the mid-range Galaxy A line that still held their share. Apple, for its part, rode one of its strongest iPhone refresh cycles in years with the iPhone 17.
Xiaomi, OPPO, and vivo do not have that cushion. They lean heavily on the budget and mid-range devices that are getting hit hardest by memory costs, so they had nowhere to hide. Omdia’s broader research on this same crisis notes that vendors are responding with cost-saving measures — older-generation chipsets, simpler camera setups, trimmed product lines, price increases, and in some cases downgrading from LTPO to cheaper LTPS OLED panels. In other words, when the parts bill goes up, something has to give, and on a cheap phone that something is usually the specs or the price.
What this actually means for buyers
It is worth being plain about this, because it is easy to read “Samsung and Apple showed resilience” as good news. For the person actually buying a phone, it mostly is not. Budget and mid-range Android phones — which is what most Indian and many global buyers purchase — are likely to keep getting pricier or arrive with quietly reduced specs, because vendors are passing memory costs on to shoppers rather than eating them. Less storage at a given price, an older chipset, a cheaper display panel: these are the concrete ways the crunch shows up in your hand.
Samsung and Apple’s gains are real, but they are partly a story about who can command higher prices, not who is delivering more value. Samsung’s own mid-range Galaxy A getting “modestly pricier” is part of the same dynamic, not an exception to it — the company held share by charging more, in the same climate that hurt its rivals. Pricing power protected the leaders’ market share; it did not protect the buyer’s wallet.
The India angle
One caveat up front: Omdia’s report is global data and does not break out India-specific shipment figures, so what follows is androidpure’s own reasonable inference, not a number from the report. But the connection is hard to ignore. Xiaomi, OPPO, and vivo are three of the best-selling smartphone brands in India, across their Redmi, Poco, iQOO, vivo, and OPPO sub-brands. A global share slide driven by rising memory costs is very likely to be felt directly by Indian buyers — through a slower cadence of new models, fewer of the aggressive price cuts that define festive-season sales, or spec downgrades in the sub-₹20,000 tier that is the heart of India’s market.
This also rhymes with a trend we covered recently: rising component and manufacturing costs are already a live issue for Indian phone pricing, as we noted in our look at India’s smartphone import-duty exemptions. Memory chips are simply the biggest and most acute example yet.
What happens next
Omdia does not expect relief soon. It forecasts the sharpest volume declines over the next two quarters, as normal seasonal demand — new launches, India’s festive shopping, the US holiday season — runs headlong into constrained memory supply. In practical terms, that points to phones at the low end getting pricier or harder to find heading into the second half of 2026, exactly when many people are looking to buy.
Source: Omdia market share report (via Business Wire), July 13, 2026.
