Bad news, BlackBerry: UK user base will fall below that of Windows Phone this ...

BlackBerry's Z10 met indifferent buyer reactions - and now the company's strong position in the UK is being eroded. Photograph: Nathan Denette/AP

BlackBerry's UK user base will fall below that of Windows Phone this year, ending its position as a stronghold for the brand in Europe, according to new data from research group eMarketer.

From a position at the end of 2013 where BlackBerry had 3.6m UK users, against 1.9m for Windows Phone and legacy Windows Mobile users, by the end of this year Blackberry will have 2.4m users - against 2.7m for Microsoft's platform, eMarketer says.

By contrast Android phone use will have gone from 16.5m to 19.3m in the same time, and Apple's iPhone from 9.6m to 11.1m, eMarketer says. Between them, Android phones and iPhones will have 53% and 30.5% of the smartphone market by the end of 2015, eMarketer says - and forecasts that will grow to 54% and 31.5% respectively by the end of 2015.

By then BlackBerry's installed base is forecast to have fallen to just 1.4m consumers, eMarketer says.

The decline is a blow for BlackBerry, for which the UK was once a key market. It depends for the majority of its revenues on handset sales - which have crashed from a quarterly high of nearly 15m at the end of 2010 to only 1.6m in its most recent financial quarter.

But the news is encouraging for Microsoft, which has been trying to catch up with the growth of Apple's iPhone and Google's Android since launching Windows Phone in 2010.

'The demise of BlackBerry has long been documented, but these numbers highlight just how far it has fallen from grace,' said Bill Fisher, UK analyst at eMarketer. 'Android and iOS are clearly dominant, but while Microsoft is making significant effort to grow its presence by buying Nokia's mobile phone unit and recently partnering with HTC to offer a Windows-based version of the flagship HTC One M8, BlackBerry appears to have been treading water.'

eMarketer estimates for UK smartphone installed base by platform 2013-2015. Photograph: /eMarketer

Amid thumping losses and buyer indifference to its new BB10 handsets, BlackBerry ousted its previous chief executive Thorsten Heins in September 2013, and replaced him with outsider John Chen, who was given a mission to turn the loss-making smartphone company around.

Chen has cut jobs and focussed the company on its 'core competency' of secure messaging for businesses and governments - leading to the claim today by David Cameron that he relies on his BlackBerry to run the country remotely.

But it seems that will not reverse BlackBerry's slide among consumers, even as usage of smartphones grows.

Windows Phone will have a 7.5% share of the UK installed base by the end of 2014, and 9% - or 3.5m users - by the end of 2015, the company says.

That still leaves Windows Phone some distance behind the iPhone, forecasts to have 12.4m users then, and Android phones overall, expected to have 21.3m users.

Following a dramatic rise in smartphone penetration during 2013 to reach 64.3% of all mobile phone users, and 51.6% of all the population, eMarketer says that by the end of 2014 smartphone ownership will hit 69.5% of mobile phone users, and 56.1% of the population.

But it forecasts a slowdown by the end of 2018, with user numbers growing that year by only 3.4% to around 46.4m, by which time 84.8% of mobile phone users will have one.

Nokia's discontinued Symbian still has faithful users, according to the study, which reckons there were 1m users at the end of 2014 and will still be 0.5m at the end of this year. The last Symbian phone was released in 2012, but data from Kantar, another research company, shows that Symbian ownership in the UK peaked in September 2010 at around 7m users, or 37% of smartphone owners at the time.