Video

There are many benefits and limitations between Android and iOS. David Krebs, from VDC Research explains the advantages and disadvantages of each.

Video Script

What are the benefits of the Android OS? In terms of comparing Android to iOS, more specifically, they’re very different beasts. Android is a completely open platform that is being leveraged by a multitude of OEMs. It’s actually the leading OS in terms of overall smartphone market share with over 80 percent market share globally and hundreds, if not thousands of OEMs writing applications or supporting devices that are running Android. So, there is a very diverse ecosystem of OEMs and a very open platform and that gives organizations a lot of creativity. Now with that openness we’ve seen the issue of fragmentation. There’s a lot of variation between one vendor’s version of an Android experience versus another based on the additional software that they are adding to their solution. So, fragmentation has been a challenge for Android for sure. With the openness also, there has been issues with regard to security and malware concerns. It’s been much more vulnerable to those attacks or the potential at least for those attacks.  

What are the benefits of iOS? Compared to iOS, iOS is much more closed it’s essentially a closed ecosystem. It’s an appliance model that Apple has developed and that the only vendor out there that is developing iOS is Apple. So, it’s sort of a known entity. It’s a much more controlled environment but that also introduces limitations. If you want iOS, you have to buy devices from Apple. If you want Android, you have very many options to consider. With regard to iOS and Android from a developer standpoint, the access to device specific capabilities and being able to code down to the kernel level, Apple has a lot of limitations from that standpoint. So, when we are thinking about enterprise and enterprise use cases and really trying to manage the platform and manage the experience, those limitations certainly come to mind when thinking about iOs versus Android.