A new study shows that iOS has become more popular among enterprise users as Apple reclaims market share from Google's Android OS.
A company called Egnyte, which provides cloud backup storage services, conducted the study. Based on a sample pool of 100,000 of its customers, Egnyte estimates that iPhone users account for 48 percent of market share, with iPad users accounting for another 30 percent and Android gobbles up the remaining 22 percent.
"Apple seems to have at least temporarily won the hearts and minds of business users with its products accounting for about 70 percent of our traffic," Egnyte told TechCrunch. "While initially iPads dominated our use, iPhones have taken over. 2011 use showed the iPad accounting for 40 percent of our usage, in 2012 iPhones are now 42 percent of usage, and Android has remained constant at about 30 percent of use."
BlackBerry must be feeling extremely left out. It wasn't long ago when the company, still called RIM (Research in Motion), dominated the industry and its BlackBerry handsets were the undisputed heavyweight of the enterprise smartphone world.
The BlackBerry's enterprise-grade security features and full keyboard helped it gain an early lead in the business world. BlackBerry rested on its laurels however, and is now working feverishly to release a device awfully similar to an iPhone.
Egnyte draws a couple of interesting conclusions from the study:
"Apple products were rarely seen in the corporate landscape. It's also an indication that when BYOD (Bring Your Own Device) wrested control over what devices consumers used from IT, they overwhelmingly chose an easy to use product that focused on UI and usability, perhaps even at times over depth."
It should be noted that over the course of the year and a half during which Egnyte conducted its survey, the numbers shifted frequently and fairly radically. Although they trended in the same direction for the most part, it's unclear what the survey's margin of error is or to what extent the conclusions drawn may be anomalous to the sample pool.
TechCrunch might know since Egnyte shared the numbers with them directly, but they haven't shared.
