Some final thoughts on the Peerless Research Group survey that underlies Honeywell’s white paper, Are Smartphones and Tablets Suitable for Use in Warehouse and Distribution Center Operations?:
While the survey reports that current usage in the industrial arena heavily favors iPhones over Android-based smartphones by 56% to 29% and iPads over Android-based tablets by 43% to 4% (wow!), it also reveals that this trend is likely to reverse. With respect to managers inclined to standardize their enterprise systems to a single mobile-OS platform, 56% reported to Peerless Research that they were considering Android, while fewer (51%) were now considering iOS. I suspect this is an example of industrial applications belatedly mirroring the consumer market.
As per International Data Corporation’s (IDC) November 2012 report:
Android’s third-quarter share of the mobile-OS market increased from 57.5% to 75% from 2011 to 2012.- Apple’s iOS increased from 13.8% to 14.9%, with BlackBerry, Symbian, Windows and Linux rounding out the pack.
- Shipments of Android devices increased by 91.5% from quarter to quarter, topping 100 million units.
- Shipments of iOS devices increased by 57.3%.
Shipments of BlackBerry devices declined by 34.7%.- Shipments of Windows mobile devices increased by 140% quarter to quarter, to 3.6 million units worldwide!
But, given the overall dominance of Android in consumer markets, why has iOS been so dominant in logistics industries until now?
As an early adopter of Android smartphones, was frustrated that high-end apps, such as SkySafari, which allows users to remotely control sophisticated telescope mounts via mobile devices, were for too long available only in iOS form. Given the market share of Android, I was surprised by this and spoke with Tim DeBenedictis, leader of the SkySafari team, to find out why. What I learned surprised me.
Among the several factors he listed, each of which was significant, the one he considered most problematic was the shear number and variety of distinct (and often short-lived) Android-based hardware platforms, making it far more difficult to accurately model app performance from device to device. In contrast, Apple’s few, sequential flavors of the iPhone were easy to master. Tim brought SkySafari to iOS first simply because he could do so faster, and being first to market was almost as critical to the success of SkySafari as being the best in that market. Almost. Of course, SkySafari is now available on the Android market as well. After all, Android’s 75-percent market share is simply too big for premier mobile-app developers to ignore forever.
Fortunately, managers planning for deployment of Android devices in industrial-enterprise environments have the advantage of controlling which specific hardware platforms will be introduced, making it far easier to develop and test proprietary apps, whether in house or through contract sources. As new, long-lived Android hardware platforms, such as Honeywell’s Dolphin 70e Black, begin to dominate industrial-enterprise settings, Android-app developers will finally enjoy the best of both OS worlds: the relative ease of writing mobile apps for a finite hardware platform together with the financial advantages of writing apps for the most popular mobile-OS platform. And that’s great news for the warehouse and DC-operations communities.