iOS Dominates Global Mobile Device Enrollment [Report]

Apple is slowly but steadily conquering the enterprise market: According to a recent Citrix study, iOS was the preferred platform in North America, retaining 62% of the customers who have deployed enterprise mobility management in the cloud during the holiday quarter of 2012. Android has recorded a tremendous growth in Europe, the Middle East and Africa.


iOS has grown at the expense of Android in the past quarter, with Google’s mobile platform losing two percentage points compared to the prior quarter on a global scale. The rise of iOS may be related to the increase in mobile malware that the industry saw during the past year. The number of unique malware samples detected in reputation systems totaled in the low thousands (versus 50,000 to 100,000 detected per day in non-mobile), but antivirus vendor McAfee saw rise to nearly 40,000 in 2012, with 97% being Android-based, the Citrix report highlights.

Apple’s mobile platform was preferred by retailers and restaurants, in which mobile users engage customers one-on-one, while Android was the first choice in the transportation and utilities industry. The biggest iPad market penetration was in legal, retail, restaurants, real estate and manufacturing sectors, while the energy, banking, insurance and finance industries opted for the iPhone. Communications services and healthcare turned to be the largest Android adopters.

An interesting highlight of the Citrix report is that organizations became more aggressive on app blacklisting, with 18% of customers deploying this policy, a 11% increase compared to the previous quarter. Apps like Angry Birds, Facebook, Dropbox, YouTube and Skype became the most commonly blacklisted apps, while Evernote, NitroDesk TouchDown, Chrome and Adobe Reader became the most commonly whitelisted mobile applications.