IDC isn’t too optimistic about how the tablet market will fare over the next few years.

The market research firm on Thursday scaled back its five-year forecast for the product category following the first year-over-year decline in worldwide tablet shipments in the fourth quarter of 2014. IDC predicts that tablet makers will ship 234.5 million units in 2015, a “modest” year-over-year increase of 2.1 percent from 2014.

But on a brighter note, tablet shipments probably won’t go down in the long run, IDC said. Even with this “tempered” outlook, IDC expects “low but positive” growth for the market in the years to come as tablet demand in the commercial sector goes up and Microsoft slowly starts to make a name for itself.

“Despite the growing popularity of phablets, there still remains a portion of the market that wants to use a larger device so they can tailor their experience to the appropriate screen size,” Jitesh Ubrani, senior research analyst for IDC’s Worldwide Quarterly Tablet Tracker, said in a statement(Opens in a new window). “Meanwhile, an increasing number of vendors behind small tablets are reducing prices and adopting features like voice calling to entice consumers to purchase their products over competing phablets, making the dynamics of phablets vs voice-capable tablets an interesting one to watch.”

IDC expects Android to remain the top tablet platform with nearly two-thirds of the market through 2019. Meanwhile, Apple’s iOS, the former leader of the market, will likely be the “weakest link” in the years to come, the firm said. IDC expects Apple’s share of the market to decline in 2015, reaching levels below that of the past three years. Windows, on the other hand, is expected to “gain significant share,” growing from 5.1 percent in 2014 to 14.1 percent in 2019.

“Microsoft is doing a lot of good things right now and we believe the launch of Windows 10 later this year will not only have a significant impact on Microsoft’s share of the market, but on the industry as a whole,” IDC’s Tablet Research Director Jean Philippe Bouchard said in a statement. “There is an appetite for a platform that can provide a productivity experience that remains consistent across multiple form factors and device types, and we believe Microsoft is well positioned to capture some of that demand.”