Egnyte, a paid service geared toward “enterprise file sharing” across devices, did an experiment tracking which mobile operating systems a sample of 100,000 of its paying customers were using to access it. While Android’s market share remained at a standstill for the majority of 2012, the iPhone (iOS) has started thinning out Android’s slice of the pie so far in 2013.
In Q3 2011, Q4 2011, and the entire year of 2012, Android’s enterprise market share among the 100,000 Egnyte customers remained at 30 percent. In the second half of 2011, iPhone had 28 percent share and iPad dominated with 40 percent. Throughout 2012, Apple’s own products fought against each other; iPhone rose to 42 percent and iPad dropped to 27 percent.
It’s been a different story in 2013. iPhone has captured a 48 percent share in the first quarter thus far, iPad holds 30 percent, and for the first time Android fell to 22 percent less than half of the iPhone’s share.
“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 stated. “This is important because it’s a flip-flop from the days of old, where Apple products were rarely seen in the corporate landscape.”
Note that Egnyte’s users are primarily based in the United States only 20 percent are European and that the service doesn’t necessarily accurately represent mobile OS market share stats for the entire enterprise market. It does paint a potentially revealing picture, though.