New devices help iOS steal back enterprise share from Android; breakdown is 85% iPhone 6, 15% iPhone 6 Plus

Apple has managed to reverse a recent trend of declining quarterly enterprise share for device activations, thanks to its new smartphones. The breakdown for businesses buying new iPhones is in line with what we’ve seen before: 85 percent of activations were for the iPhone 6 while iPhone 6 Plus activations accounted for just 15 percent.

The latest findings come from Good Technology‘s Mobility Index Report. While this is still early data (the new iPhones haven’t even been on sale for a full quarter), it’s worth noting that the enterprise numbers match up with others from the industry: App analytics data has previously suggested iPhone 6 is outselling iPhone 6 Plus by a 6-to-1 margin.

iOS made up 69 percent of enterprise device activations in Q3 2014, up 2 points from 67 percent in Q2 2014. Android activation share dropped the same amount to 29 percent.

Good Technology says, “The release of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus accounted for all of this gain.” More specifically, iOS was down to 66 percent of activations in July and August, but comprised 73 percent of September activations thanks to sales of the new devices.

Windows Phone activations remain consistent with the six previous quarters: flat at 1 percent. It’s worth noting that since BlackBerry devices use BlackBerry Enterprise Server for corporate email access, Good Technology does not have insight into BlackBerry handset activations.

On the tablet side, iPads maintained the vast majority of tablet activations. For the second straight quarter though, Android slightly increased its share of total activations, now accounting for 11 percent:

Yet overall, the trends in the enterprise remain unchanged. Businesses prefer iOS, sometimes choose Android, and essentially ignore Windows Phone. Google will likely be pushing hard with Android 5.0 Lollipop while Microsoft’s Windows 10 strategy won’t arrive till late next year.

The report highlighted three other interesting findings:

• Custom app activations more than doubled (107 percent) quarter-over-quarter and grew by 731 percent year-over-year to become the most widely activated app category.
• Behind custom apps, secure instant messaging and secure browsing dominated the smartphone. They ranked No. 2 and No. 3 respectively on this form factor.
• On tablets, users are increasingly utilizing document editing and document access tools. They ranked No. 1 and No. 3 respectively on this form factor, with custom apps in between.

Good Technology’s reports are an ongoing initiative to track activations across the breadth of mobile platforms and devices in enterprises and governments. They are based on data aggregated from all devices spanning “more than 6,000 organizations in over 190 countries.”