Statistically speaking, nobody is buying phones that run BlackBerry’s operating system anymore.

New figures released this week show that BlackBerry’s OS was installed on about 208,000 smartphones sold worldwide in the last three months of 2016.

In a report from tech research firm Gartner, that number rounds to 0.0 per cent of all smartphone sales during the quarter.

During the same period one year earlier, BlackBerry’s 907,000 phone sales accounted for 0.2 per cent of the global market.

The Waterloo-based company has been pivoting away from smartphone manufacturing in recent years, choosing instead to focus on its software business and attempting to bring its reputation for security to the fore in that arena.

The vast majority of phones sold during the fourth quarter – about 350 million, or 81.7 per cent of the total – ran on the Android operating system.

Apple’s iOS came in second, with about 77 million phone sales representing 17.9 per cent of the total, while Windows was the operating system on nearly 1.1 million phones, or 0.3 per cent of the total.

Other operating systems were featured on about 530,000 phones, or 0.1 per cent of the total.

To show how much the smartphone market has grown over the past decade, 5.8 million sales was enough to put RIM in second place in worldwide sales in the third quarter of 2008 – behind Nokia’s 15.4 million and ahead of Apple’s 4.7 million.

When it came to sales by individual smartphone makers, Gartner found, Apple and Samsung remain locked in a tight battle.

Samsung’s sales volume for the fourth quarter came in just below 76.8 million, putting it one-tenth of a percentage point behind Apple.

Overall, the 432 million smartphones sold worldwide during the three-month period represented a seven per cent increase over the final three months of 2015.

Chinese brands like Huawei, Oppo and BBK now account for more than 20 per cent of all smartphone sales.