Good Technology, which makes the Good for Enterprise (GFE) platform for iOS and Android, today rolled out metrics for 2010, the first full year that Good Technologies has supported both platforms. According to the report, iOS has seen the biggest growth in the enterprise over the past year, in large part due to the popularity of the iPad among business users.
According to Good, iOS remained the most-activated platform by Good’s customers in the fourth quarter of 2010 and had roughly twice the activations of Android for the full year. However, iOS and Android maintained similar growth trajectories from October through December of 2010. In the smartphone category, Android devices represented 42 percent of all smartphones activated, while various iPhone models represented 58 percent.
The Motorola Droid X and the Droid 2 were the most popular Android devices activated in the last quarter of 2010, while the iPhone 4 was the leading device overall.
The report found that iOS has come to dominate the enterprise space and is particularly concentrated in the financial services and healthcare industries. Good believes that 2011 will be “the year of the tablet” with the iPad continuing its rapid growth and new Android tablet form factors also taking a larger piece of this growing pie.
While Windows Mobile devices continued to decline, the company does not expect the platform to disappear. The report concludes that organizations in the government/public sector remain “heavy users of Windows Mobile,” and will keep Microsoft’s platform alive.
Symbian continued to be the platform with the least activations, but the company says this is partially influenced by Good’s customer base, which is more concentrated in North America than in Europe and other geographies where Symbian still has significant market share.
Because Research In Motion (RIM) devices use only the BlackBerry Enterprise Server (BES) for corporate email access, Good does not have insight into BlackBerry handset activation trends and they are not reflected in this report. Additionally, Windows Phone 7 devices are not reflected in the report’s activation numbers, as Good does not yet support Windows Phone 7.
Good Technology analyzes activations by month across “thousands of corporate and government customers” to determine the Top 10 most frequently activated devices and the overall trend for net new activations across all of the mobile OS platforms that the company supports.
