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Apple’s iOS market share increased from 69 percent to 73 percent of all activations during the fourth quarter, riding the momentum of the September 2014 launch of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, according to Good Technology’s quarterly Mobility Index Report.
Android market share declined to 25 percent, while Windows Phone and Microsoft Surface held one percent of the market share in total device activations.
Topping the list of most activated apps this quarter is secure mobile browsing, which realized a 197 percent quarter-over-quarter increase and was the most activated app, increasing tenfold during 2014.
“We have historically seen iOS activations spike after the September release of new devices,” Lynn Lucas, chief marketing officer at Good Technology, told eWEEK. “So it’s not surprising to see that the new iOS device activations momentum carried into Q4 and the holiday season.”
Lucas noted that while Windows Phone and Microsoft Surface remain at roughly 1 percent in enterprise activations, Good hears from many organizations that they plan to increase their deployment of Windows, and in particular the Microsoft Surface platform, in many markets.
The activation of secure mobile apps grew 65 percent during the fourth quarter and 300 percent during the year, the report found.
Secure instant messaging also exhibited a 131 percent increase during the quarter and a nine-fold increase throughout the year.
“We’re seeing the need for increased cyber resiliency,” Lucas said. “Recent cyber-attacks are illustrating the catastrophic damage that can be done at both private and public sector organizations. A secure browser mitigates multiple attack vectors that plague native browsers.”
Lucas said a secure browser prevents the potential of sensitive data being forensically recovered by providing data-at-rest, thus ensuring encryption of offline content, which includes offline cache, cookies, and other various authentication tokens.
The report found device adoption varies significantly across industries, with iOS devices outpacing Android in regulated industries, such as legal (95 percent), public sector (82 percent) and financial services (81 percent).
Android was more widely adopted in industries with fewer regulatory compliance restrictions, such as high tech (45 percent), manufacturing (39 percent) and transportation (35 percent).
“The Android security concerns that we frequently hear from our customers are fragmentation of the Android platform, relative ease in rooting the device, a proliferation in malware and a limited set of policies,” Lucas said. “In general, Good believes in a layered security approach. Purely relying on the OS for security, for any platform, is insufficient. Containerizing business apps and data protects against potential data leakage.”