I have seen this, but it isn't because iOS devices are necessarily
better
for businesses, but it's more of a perception of security and control.
Apple does a great job of marketing this. My experience with Android
has
never involved malware infections, and any that have shown up in the
media
have been blown way out of proportion. Bad security practices of the
user
are usually at fault on any mobile or desktop platform.
I think the media always blows security issues out of proportion - but
then it does that with anything, so its perhaps not saying much :)
It is probably only partly perception of security and control that means
many large organizations do tend to go Apple rather than Android. There
are other reasons I'm sure. The build quality for Apple devices is
consistently very high for example (it should be as they are very
expensive relatively speaking). That's a real concern if you are rolling
100's devices out in an organization - after all you don't want to have
to be continually replacing individuals devices due to them not being
robust enough for the job. I suspect there is also an element of 'oh
look we use Apple devices' - after all Apple have (whether or not it is
justified) gained a considerable reputation for producing high quality,
well engineered premium devices - so there is probably a fair amount of
'how the company looks to the outside world' in the decisions which are
made when choosing what hardware to adopt.
However, that being said, it is a fact that iOS is significantly more
locked down than Android. e.g. It is much easier to connect an Android
device to a computer and prod around inside it just by enabling a single
setting on the device itself. With iOS devices this isn't quite so easy
- although possible. All access mechanisms used for development (which
by their nature require slightly more general access than end-user use)
are completely private in the iOS world - any tools which are not
Xcode/iTunes which give any access to iOS devices exist because various
private frameworks and protocols have been reversed engineered (a
practice which puts any company in a very grey area legally if they then
attempt to use such things).
Android has also long had the problem that individual vendors are
allowed to customize Android significantly as long as they agree to
conform to certain 'compatibility requirements'. This means that the
roll out of critical security updates has long been quite poor (as far
as I understand it). There are several layers typically between updates
to the core platform and the device vendors who must then integrate,
update and deploy the updates to their users. This means that security
updates can be very slow to come to many Android devices, with many
not-that-old ones being left vulnerable in the water.
Of course, the latter looks like it is set to change significantly. A
couple of the most recent somewhat heinous attacks and flaws against
Android seem to have prompted a all the major Android vendors committing
to monthly security updates - leading on from Google's announcement.
This might well start to change the iOS-secure vs Android-insecure meme
which has been around for a long time.
Mark.
--
Mark Waddingham ~ m...@livecode.com ~ http://www.livecode.com/
LiveCode: Everyone can create apps
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