Apple ups lead over Android among business users

The iPhone and iPad continue to outshine Android devices among businesses both large and small, says a report from cloud storage company Egnyte.

Among the 100,000 Egnyte customers tracked for the new report, iOS has carved out an increasingly higher share while Android's slice has dipped of late.

Egnyte sells online storage, file sharing, and other cloud-based services to businesses of all sizes. As such, the company is able to determine which mobile operating systems its customers use to access its services, which it did so for this latest report.

As described by TechCrunch, early data from Egnyte for the first quarter of 2013 showed a 48 percent share for the iPhone, 30 percent for the iPad, and 22 percent for Android (both phones and tablets).

Though preliminary, those figures show a gain for Apple and a decline for Android from last year. In 2012, Egnyte's data revealed a 42 percent share for the iPhone, 27 percent for the iPad, and 30 percent for Android phones and tablets. Other mobile operating systems combined eked out just 1 percent.

And for the second half of 2011, the data uncovered a 28 percent share for the iPhone, 40 percent for the iPad, 30 percent for Android, and 2 percent for other mobile platforms.

Over time, the iPhone is the clear winner in the bunch, jumping in usage from a little more than a quarter of all Egnyte customers tracked to almost half. At the same time, the iPad saw its usage drop, while Android remained steady until just this year.

Engyte's data doesn't necessarily tell the whole story. The report doesn't specifically refer to BlackBerry devices, which typically have been popular among enterprise users. Rather, the data focuses more on the battle between iOS and Android.

"Apple seems to have at least temporarily won the hearts and minds of business users with its products accounting for about 70 percent of our traffic," Egnyte told TechCrunch.