Apple's iOS holds onto its lead in enterprise, but loses ground in tablet share
Sales of the iPhone have been breaking records quarter after quarter. On the crest of that wave, Apple has maintained its position as the market leader in enterprise mobile device activations for the first quarter of 2015. However, the iPad’s tablet share is slowly being eaten away by competing models, according to a recent report from Good Technology. This report has to be taken with at least a grain of salt, however, because it lacks data about BlackBerry devices.
In its Mobility Index Report for 2015’s first quarter, the enterprise mobility solutions firm has found that iOS accounted for 72 percent of all mobile device activations. That represents a drop of a single percentage point since last quarter to Google’s Android, and includes the iPhone 6 coming in as the most popular enterprise device for the period. The iPhone 6 represented 26 percent of all activations, while the Samsung Galaxy S5 was the top device in the Android market.
Apple and Samsung dominated the mobile market for enterprise devices, producing 28 of the top 30 devices tracked in Good Technology’s report. Windows Phone activations maintained position at 1 percent of all device activations, with tablets running Windows Pro appearing in this report for the first time.
Apple’s iPad still led the market in tablets, but Cupertino saw its share drop to 81 percent in the first quarter, down four points. Android and Windows tablets have been slowly but surely chipping away at iPad’s position as leader; Android’s share of the tablet market, in particular, has nearly doubled since 2014 and now stands at 15 percent for the first quarter of 2015. Microsoft’s Surface tablet models have also garnered interest in certain industries, and Windows has seen its market share rise from 1 to 4 percent during the quarter.
Good Technology compiles its report by aggregating activation data from its global customer base of more than 6,200 organizations in 189 countries. These numbers, however, do not include BlackBerry’s share of the market, because Good Technology does not have access to the Canadian firm’s Enterprise Server. We know BlackBerry has been commanding less and less of the enterprise market, but its forced exclusion from this report makes the study reflect a bit less than the whole story.
