Enterprise Mobility: Apple iOS Overshadows Android in WWDC, Google I/O Market Statistics

Share

By Clint Boulton on 2011-06-09

Apple’s 2011 Worldwide Developer Conference will be remembered as the event where CEO Steve Jobs ushered the company he built and resuscitated into the cloud, with the caveat that applications are still stored locally on users’ Macs, iPhones, iPad and iPod Touches. What this means for Apple customers is that people who buy an iOS device this fall will no longer need to plug an iOS device into a PC to activate it. Apple’s iCloud will synchronize and back up users’ photos, music and documents and all software will be updated over the Internet. Users will be able to port any music they purchase to all their devices at no additional charge. New music purchases can automatically be downloaded and pushed to up to 10 different devices for free. “We are going to demote the PC to just be a device. We are going to move the digital hub, the center of your digital life, into the cloud,” Jobs said in his keynote speech June 6. So Apple is starting fresh from the cloud. However, the event also sharpened the focus on the gulf between Apple iOS and Apple’s other popular products and Google’s Android operating system and its related ecosystem in the burgeoning mobile market. What these numbers show is that Android, despite its soaring popularity all over the world, has some work to do when it comes to becoming as popular a mobile platform as iOS.