The smartphone market is extremely competitive with the four main platforms battling it out to win consumers over to their offering. Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android platforms have long dominated the market as news emerges that BlackBerry’s market share continues to shrink despite the BB10 release.

It has come to light that Microsoft’s Windows Phone operating system has now reached third place behind Android and iOS, and at the expense of BlackBerry that now slips down to fourth place. According to the IDC Android is still way out in front with a massive 75% of the smartphone market during the first quarter of 2013 with Apple’s iOS coming in behind at 17.3%.

Compared to the previous year Android saw a 79.5% increase year on year, which compares to iOS that managed a more modest 6.6% increase in market share. It was Microsoft that saw the biggest gains around the world though with a 3.2% share of the global market which is an increase of 133.3 percent.

BlackBerry saw a decline though now holding 2.9% of the market which is a 35.1% decline compared to a year ago. The figures also reveal that Nokia shifted 5.6m Lumia handsets which put the Finnish manufacture way out in front on the Windows Phone platform.

Android unsurprisingly is dominated by Samsung that accounted for 41.1% of the market, while the iOS software is blamed for the speed of growth for Apple but this is tipped to change once iOS 7 is released later this year.

It will be interesting to see the figures for the next quarter as then the BlackBerry 10 OS will have been available longer and in more regions, but for the time being it doesn’t make happy reading for executives from the company.