On the first of the month, Canalys published a report on smartphone shipments and found that Huawei had moved ahead of Apple to become the world’s number two player, right behind Samsung, in the second quarter.

Today, Gartner published a similar report for the same period and found the same overall results, but in sales — that is, not retailer stock requests, but customers checkouts.

[table]

Vendor,2Q18 Units (Share),2Q17 Units (Share),Change (Share)

Samsung,72.3M (19.3%),82.9M (22.6%),-12% (-15%)

Huawei,49.8M (13.3%),35.9M (9.8%),+39% (+36%)

Apple,44.7M (11.9%),44.3M (12.1%),+0% (-2%)

Xiaomi,32.8M (8.8%),21.2M (5.8%),+55% (+52%)

OPPO,28.5M (7.6%),26.1M (7.1%),+9% (+7%)

Others,146.1M (39%),156.2M (42.6%),-7% (-9%)

Total,374.3M,366.6M,+2%

[/table]

For those who have been watching these trends for years, they continue to make themselves obvious. The global market is still growing, but it’s been slowing down.

Apple is still growing — it’s been fighting for bigger and better impressions during the holidays that could last through the rest of the fiscal year. It failed to do that this year with the iPhone X. Sales were poorer than the high street had hoped.

Chinese manufacturers are growing big time with Huawei and Xiaomi taking big jumps like they promised they would. For the former, it was the youth-focused Honor brand that did most of the growing: in the prior Canalys report, shipments jumped by 16 million in Q2. But global expansion is in all of their cards. And that has left Samsung, in a minor iteration phase of its development cycle, battling the above forces with limited results.

In the report TechCrunch obtained, Gartner also mentioned that Android had an 8 to 1 advantage in share over iOS and that advantage was growing.

Apple’s challenge, however, has been to convert Android users over at a lower hardware price level before leveraging an ecosystem appeal to lead to a premium push.