Honor, Nothing, and Google Pixel were some of 2025’s fastest-growing phone brands

Ben Schoon | Feb 5 2026 - 10:35 am PT

The 2025 smartphone market ended on a high note, acting as the calm before the storm with brands including Google Pixel, Nothing, and Honor being among the fastest-growing smartphone brands of the year.

In a new report from Omdia, it’s revealed that the global smartphone market as a whole grew by around 2% in 2025. That’s ahead of an expected drop of around 7% in 2026, others have forecasted, due to the state of the industry and factors such as the memory shortage.

Omdia’s report says that Samsung and Apple both grew by around 7%, with Apple having been the world’s largest smartphone brand in 2025 by a small margin. The top brands shifted around slightly, with numbers as follows:

Apple 19% (+7% YoY)
Samsung 19% (+7% YoY)
Xiaomi 13% (-2% YoY)
Vivo 8% (+4% YoY)
Oppo 8% (-3% YoY)
Transsion 8% (-8% YoY)
Honor 6% (+11% YoY)
Lenovo 5% (+6% YoY)
Huawei 4% (+2% YoY)
Realme 3% (-13% YoY)
Others 6%

It’s Honor that is the biggest story here, with the company not only seeing the most growth of major brands at +11% year-over-year, but doing so at that big of a scale.

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The title of “fastest-growing” is technically not a hard one to achieve, because smaller scale leads to more growth. The report brings out that Nothing was the fastest-growing smartphone brand of 2025 with massive 86% year-over-year growth (higher than we’d previously heard), but that’s at a much smaller scale than Honor or any of these other major brands. Google Pixel similarly saw pretty significant 25% year-over-year growth as other recent reports revealed but, again, not at the same scale.

This comes as all three of these brands are working on their next launches, with Google set to release Pixel 10a later this month, Honor bringing its next foldable to MWC in March, and Nothing about to announce the Phone (4a) lineup.