How iOS And Android Have Altered Mobility

By Brian Albright, Field Technologies

It’s hard to imagine it now, but there was a mobile world before the iPhone and before Google released its Android platform. The release of those two platforms had a tremendous impact on the mobile phone market – as well as on the rugged device space, and the way field service companies approach mobility projects.

A new study from IDATE DigiWorld (commissioned by Google) takes a look at that impact. While the paper (which you can download here) focuses largely on the consumer phone space, it does a nice job of outlining how these two operating systems changed the mobile device space.

The Dark Ages?

The paper describes the pre-Android and pre-iOS landscape as a “closed circle with little innovation,” dominated by Windows Smartphone, Palm OS, Java, BREW, and Symbian. Developer markets for these platforms were closed. IDATE overplays this era as some sort of mobile “dark ages,” but it was a period marked by platform fragmentation and proprietary development.

What made iOS and Android appealing was that both were open to mass development, which helped create a new developer economy. There was also a new model for distributing these applications via app stores with favorable revenue sharing models that were much more beneficial to developers than the previous carrier-dominated app portals.

The iPhones release in 2007, followed by the opening of the app store in 2008, created a new model for generating and accessing consumer applications and, eventually, business software.

Because of this model, iOS and Android quickly expanded their share of the market. In 2010, Java had the largest installed base of 3 billion devices. At the time, there was significant fragmentation (multiple versions of the same OS), with developers forced to create multiple versions of the same application to work with different devices and carriers.

While there is some fragmentation in the Android space, it is significantly lower than what was true of Java and Symbian according to IDATE’s figures.

The other key innovation Apple brought to the mobile market was the use of the touchscreen-based user experience and a powerful Web rendering engine. That helped spur an increase in the use of the mobile Internet, in part because of the easier to use interface and ability to access regular Websites in addition to mobile optimized sites.

Over the course of six years, smartphones grew from just 15 percent of the market to more than 70 percent of the phone market. Once iOS and Android entered the market, Symbian rapidly vanished, and Windows Mobile saw its presence shrink considerably.

The paper goes on to state that increased competition that resulted from the open approach to development also helped drive down hardware prices, although the effect may have been indirect.

“In the end, it is difficult to say that iOS and Android have directly impacted the affordability of smartphone devices. However, by creating a sizeable market, they created the conditions for economies of scale to materialize,” the study states.

Modern mobile developers are more open to working on different platforms, engaging on average with 2.5 platforms, and that development is often done in a language other than the one native to the OS (i.e., HTML5).

“This multi-platform approach is being facilitated by the increasing use of cross-platform tools (like Xamarin or PhoneGap to name a few) that help to build a single source development approach that can be deployed on various platforms with minimum changes (all basic features can be handled this way),” the study says. “At least a third of developers are already using such tools, which are even popular for developers targeting primarily mobile browsers.”

In the rugged device space, the introduction of iOS and Android led traditional handheld and tablet manufacturers to adopt touchscreen technology and consumer-style interfaces. Companies have created their app stores for authorized software. iPhones (and iPads) have become a part of the field service landscape, with companies deploying them (often in rugged cases). And many of the major rugged device manufacturers now have Android offerings, with VDC noting in a recent blog that, “Android operating systems exceeded 20.0 percent of all OS shipments in the first half of 2016, with Windows Legacy platforms still accounting for roughly 68.0 percent of all rugged handheld shipments.”

For more on Android’s place in the field service market, see our recent coverage here.