Most Mobile Collaboration Happens on iOS—Not on Android
When you have access to 16 petabytes—or 16,165,494.36 gigabytes, to be exact—of business data, it pays to have data scientists take a deep dive into it. That's what Egnyte did with the data it manages on the Egnyte platform for its customers—it's our PCMag Editors Choice product for cloud backups for business, but it also offers local NAS storage. Egnyte found some interesting trends in the data that hark back to the days of computerdom yore and the eternal grudge-match of Apple Macintosh versus Microsoft Windows.
Most fascinating is the stat focused on in the company's infographic below: A full 79 percent of mobile business activity takes place entirely on the iOS platform (counting both iPhones and iPads). It's eclipsing Android (or any other mobile OS, as if there are others to consider) in the office by almost 4 times.
Smartphones, by the way, are also much more popular than tablets, with 65 percent of mobile business use on the smaller screens; but when you look at iPhone vs. iPad, the preference is only 58.5 percent iPhone vs. 41.5 percent iPad.
On Android, the tablet is truly an also-ran: 91.6 percent of users go for a smartphone over an Android tablet. (Those numbers aren't in the infographic but were provided to PCMag by Egnyte.)
The top phone for business data use within the last year (August 2017 to August 2018) was the iPhone 7. It became Apple's flagship as of September 2016, so it's not a huge surprise the 7 was the dominant iPhone in that timeframe. iPhone X was down in 14th place, behind a bunch of other iPhone and iPad models. iPhone 8 factored even lower. But chances are as they grow in use they'll supplant the 7 next time—and if they don't, that could indicate a problem for Apple.
Wondering which industries are using iOS the most? The chart shows the percentage jump year to year, and information technology's got the biggest growth at 82-plus percent. Media and entertainment aren't far behind at 76 percent. In fact, across the areas Egnyte monitored (construction, real estate, financial, business services, and healthcare), all were using iOS products for business use by a jump of 50 percent or more.
Hey, remember the good old days of Mac versus Windows? The main desktop OSes continue to duke it out, but it's clear that Microsoft never, ever lost. The percentage of business activity on Windows is a full 90.8 percent. And that's up from last year's look at similar data, when Egnyte saw "only" 88 percent use by Windows.
Your best bet for getting work done is clear: Get a Windows 10 laptop and an iPhone.
This article originally appeared on PCMag.com.