iPhone Ousts BlackBerry in the Business Market
Things aren’t going so well lately at Research in Motion, what with the worst-ever service outage in October, the class action law suits being filed as a result of that outage, and a stock price in a steady, inexorable decline. And now it appears as though the BlackBerry is being pushed out of its traditional stronghold in the business community.
Once upon a time, the BlackBerry was the smartphone of choice for discerning business people the world over. However, recent data compiled by Gartner demonstrates that while Android devices still hold a total market share of 52.5%, the iPhone has risen to a commanding 45% among enterprise users, handily ahead of the BlackBerry’s 32%.
Conventional wisdom assumes that the Android’s overall dominance lies in the fact that there are plenty of low-cost, lower-end Android smartphone models that are more accessible to casual consumers without the means to shell out for a top-dollar device, but the iPhone’s surge in the business market represents something of a tectonic shift in the mobile industry, and pundits are dedicating rather a lot of ink trying to determine how this came to pass. The consensus seems to be that the recent shift by companies of their mobile presence from tailored, internally developed applications to the cloud has allowed more and more of their employees the freedom to use whatever smartphone they choose, and what they’re choosing is the iPhone 4S. In other words, businesses are increasingly adopting “BYO smartphone policies” that allow employees to access all their relevant professional applications from whatever device they prefer for their personal use as well. This works out rather well for everyone, as businesses save money, and consumers can avoid having to be locked into specific devices they wouldn’t otherwise choose. Better yet, those consumers no longer have to worry about coming across as “dorktastic” when they’re obliged to tote around separate devices for business and personal use.
In any event, if you’re considering putting together a business application, then the iPhone is likely the best market to exploit in the coming years. And if you’re having trouble getting started, drop us a line and we can set you up with a developer.
