Being in fourth place in the world’s hottest technology market turns out not to be a winning proposition. But is third much better? And might even second place become a less comfortable spot to be in?

Those are the inevitable questions prompted by the news this week that BlackBerry is ready to throw in the towel. As with all giant markets, it is tempting to think there is room for several players, some of them thriving on small market shares with niche strategies.

But the competitiveness of technology ecosystems depends on their relative, not absolute, scale. Some 80 per cent of handsets shipped in the second quarter ran on Android, according to the latest figures from IDC. Even if many of those are low-end devices and incompatibility between them continues to make life hard for developers, the Android ecosystem is starting to exert a powerful pull.