Sales of Android-based phones more than quadrupled in the UK during the most-recent quarter.

This news comes to us in a report from GfK Retail and Technology, a self-styled "global knowledge provider" based in Nuremberg, Germany.

According to GfK, Android's share of UK smartphone contract sales sales was a mere three per cent in the first three months of 2010, but skyrocketed to 13.2 per cent in the second quarter.

Smartphones as a group accounted for exactly two-thirds of all contract sales in the second quarter of the year, an increase of over 21 per cent when compared to the same period in 2009. To be exact, GfK's stats refer to what they call "Advanced OS" phones, which they define as phones that "are able to run independent compatible applications." We'll call them smartphones.

Interestingly, overall contract-sales growth — smartphones, feature phones, and "dumb-as-a-brick" phones — from the first to the second quarter of 2010 was stagnant, coming in at less than one per cent. But during that period, smartphones' share rose, and sales of Android-based phones, as mentioned above, more than quadrupled.

While GfK's stats on Android's growth in the UK are based on performance in the contract market, AdMob's metrics reveal their growth among smartphones alone — and that Googly group's analysis charts an Androidinal rise from a 10 per cent UK smartphone marketshare in January of 2010 to 19 per cent in April.

Apple, conversely, saw its UK market share decline from 75 per cent to 64 per cent during the same period. And it wasn't only Android phones that took a bite out of Cupertino: RIM's UK share rose from two per cent to seven per cent from January through April. ®