The Android army marches on, killing other operating systems left and right, leaving carcasses of once vibrant and flourishing platforms in its wake, dangling them more and more from the Gartner and IDC market share tables, until there's no place left for them but the ambiguous "Others" row.

The latest report is brutal for both BlackBerry OS and Windows Phone / Windows 10 Mobile / whatever Microsoft is calling its platform nowadays. It's the Q4 2016 report from Gartner and in it we learn that smartphone sales have grown 7% compared to Q3, that overall 2016 sales also increased a little, that Samsung lost its top spot as smartphone vendor for the first time in a while to Apple (likely thanks to the Note 7 kaboom), but most importantly, we also learn that Android still managed to grow its market share by 1% year-on-year, despite having crossed 80% worldwide.

How it did that is by gnawing at the weak remainders of other platforms, dropping Windows Mobile from 1.1% market share in Q4 2015 to 0.3% in Q4 2016, and BlackBerry OS from 0.2% to almost 0%. There were still 1.092M Windows Mobile and 207.9K BlackBerry OS devices (read: these are not BlackBerry's newer Android devices like the Priv and DTEK line) sold in the last quarter, but these were teeny drops compared to the 352M Android devices.

We're nearing the end of the road for two platforms that were instrumental in the growth and spread of the mobile industry for years and years. RIP. They shall be fondly remembered (except for Windows' tiles and BlackBerry's Storm — what were they thinking?!) amongst other fallen giants, Symbian and Palm OS.

In their honor, I will go grab the Lumia 800 from my fiancé's storage and ask you all to get your battered Lumias or Curves or Bolds and give them a last proper goodbye. Moving on is difficult, but when I had to leave behind 5 years of Symbian loyalty to go Android, I learned that change can be a good thing too.