Android failing to get into businesses as iPhone and iPad do - Austin American-Statesman

By Brian X. Chen

THE NEW YORK TIMES

Published: 6:40 p.m. Sunday, April 29, 2012

Google's Android is installed on more devices than any other mobile software system in the world. But beyond sheer quantity, it doesn't seem to have much going for it among American businesses. Its prominence is eroding in the smartphone market here.

Android is in steep decline in the workplace, according to an analysis by Good Technology, a major information technology firm that provides software for about 3,000 businesses to manage Android and iOS devices.

The company said that from tracking device activations among clients using Good's software, it saw that 73.9 percent of smartphones in use were iPhones and 26.1 percent were Android devices. The iPhone's share is up from 62.3 percent in the similar period last year, and Android is down from 37.7 percent.

The numbers for tablets are even uglier for Android, partly because they haven't changed from last year. The iPad accounted for 97.3 percent of tablet activations for the quarter, compared with 2.7 percent for Android.

When the tablet and smartphone categories are combined, about 80 percent of Good's clients are using Apple devices, including iPhones and iPads, up from 70 percent in the year-earlier quarter.

John Herrema, a senior vice president at Good Technology, said businesses probably preferred iOS over Android because of the overall simplicity of managing iPhones and iPads as opposed to Android devices. He explained that many models of smartphones and tablets are running different versions of Android, which makes it difficult to manage them, whereas iOS is a more unified platform.

He said the growth of iOS was largely driven by companies that permitted their employees to bring their own devices to the office. In the last quarter, the iPhone was the best-selling smartphone for AT&T, Verizon and Sprint; many of these customers probably use their iPhones in the workplace, Herrema said.

Jan Dawson, a mobile analyst at Ovum, said the near future for Android looked grim. He explained that iPhone purchases were surging in the United States because of the handset's availability on multiple carriers. Previously, the iPhone was exclusive to AT&T, but in the last year it became available to Verizon and Sprint customers. The iPhone also recently became available in China.

"Android's going to have a bad few months in the U.S.," he said in an interview. "And in the whole world we'll continue to see dips in Android performance around the launches of new iPhones."