Click the graph to see the source article.

To the great annoyance of many a developer, Android 2.3 (a.k.a. “Gingerbread”), which was originally released at the end of 2010, has been the most common version of Android in the wild. Even until late last year, the general word was that accounted for half of all Android operating systems in the market.

Here’s some good news: according to Engadget, who are going by Google’s cleaned-up metrics (which are supposed to better reflect the number of active users), modern versions of Android — that is, 4.0 and higher (“Ice Cream Sandwich” and “Jellybean”) — now account for more than half the active Android installations. I think it’s safe to say that this is being driven by big sellers like the Samsung Galaxy S3 and Galaxy Note II, and should continue with the release of the S4 and HTC One.

Who Sold How Many Tablets in 1Q13?

Click the graph to see the source article.

IDC’s report on the worldwide tablet market for the first quarter of 2013 came out yesterday, and I’ve turned their numbers into the chart above. Some numbers of note:

• Total tablet shipments for 1Q13 were 49.2 million units — that’s more than were shipped in the first half of 2012.
• The year-over-year growth in tablet shipments in 1Q13 is a healthy 142%.
• Apple’s performance — selling 19.5 tablets in 1Q13 — outperformed IDC’s projected 18.7 million.
• ASUS is now the third biggest seller of tablets, thanks to its Nexus 7 tablet.
• The combined sales of Surface RT and Surface Pro tablets make up 900,000 units in 1Q13.

iOS Users Still Way More Active

Click the graph to see the source article.

You’ve probably seen a couple of articles on how iOS users account for more online activity than Android users even though there are more Android units out there, such as GoGo: in-flight Internet use 84 percent iOS, 16 Android and Time’s iOS vs. Android article. Here’s another data point: NetMarketShare’s latest web usage share data for various mobile operating systems, which shows iOS accounting for nearly 60% of web usage, more than double Android’s share.

In this article, we’ll look at those results that describe the state of BYOD at the organizations represented by the respondents.

BYOD Adoption in Organizations: Still a Long Way to Go

60% of the organizations represented in the survey have not yet adopted BYOD, but are considering it. 24% are working on the policies and practices to implement a program, and about 10% of the people who haven’t yet adopted BYOD haven’t do so because they’re forbidding it outright.

It’s always a tricky thing to ask people to quantify a “gut feeling” with questions like “How would you rate your readiness for full enterprise BYOD adoption, in percent, where 100% is completely ready?” What’s the difference between 20% ready and 30% ready? Or 70% ready and 80% ready? Still, the fact that most of the organizations represented in the survey say that they’re less than 50% ready to adopt BYOD says that there’s a lot of uncertainty about their ability to set up a BYOD program.
In the meantime, here’s what the organizations are doing right now:

Note that in the chart above, both “Privately-owned devices are in very limited use” and “Privately-owned devices are widely in use, but not supported by the organization” are the 3rd and 4th most popular categories, each accounting for more than 20% of the respondents. That’s a good chunk of people who are accessing corporate resources with any policies or technologies to manage them; in some cases, IT would probably be completely unaware of how widespread the practice would be. We like to call this practice SYOD — “Smuggle Your Own Device”; others like to simply put it under the larger blanket term “Shadow IT”; either way, it has the potential to cause you great trouble.

Simply put: most organizations still have a long way to go before they’re truly ready to support employees bringing their own devices for work.

Most BYOD guides we’ve seen cover BYOD from management’s or the IT department’s point of view; BYOD for You is the first we’ve seen that covers it from the rank-and-file employee’s angle. Written by Daniel Lohrmann, who blogs at Government Technology and has a site at BYOD4U.com, this Kindle ebook is a quick read that helps you determine an organizations BYOD maturity level, secure your BYOD mobile device and maximize its benefits, and how to cope with the way personal mobile devices are handled where you work.

BYOD for You is an easy lunchtime read; it’s divided into eight chapters, most of them about a half-dozen pages long, which cover these topics:

1. Categorizing your BYOD enivronment: Gold, Silver or Bronze?
2. Your workplace’s BYOD program, or the lack thereof
3. Security: How to safely use your mobile device at work and home
4. MDM
5. Privacy and other legal considerations
6. Maximizing the financial benefits of BYOD
7. Ethical dilemmas and proving you deserve your mobile device
8. Building a personalized BYOD plan that outlives your device

Each of the chapters end with a section that provides suggestions on how to handle its topic depending on the BYOD maturity level of your organization. Lohrmann’s model for BYOD maturity has three levels, which are explained below:

• Bronze: An organization operating at the Bronze BYOD level has employees who bring their own devices to work, but doesn’t have an official BYOD policy. It’s unclear about what happens when company information security policies and personal devices collide, if employees’ personal data will remain private, or if their work-related activities on personal devices will get them in trouble. Employees also bear all costs of using the device, even for work-related purposes. MDM is practically or completely non-existent.
• Silver: In organizations operating at the Silver BYOD level, there is a basic BYOD policy that spells out how its data can be accessed, as well as issues of security and privacy, and there is tacit permission for employees to access their work email from their devices. Employees can choose between all-expenses-paid COPE devices or BYOD devices without any reimbursement for operating costs. MDM is limited; it’s often something basic, like what’s provided by Microsoft Exchange ActiveSync.
• Gold: At the Gold level of BYOD, there’s a full BYOD policy, and employees are fully reimbursed for all device costs. All devices are under full MDM.

Even though it’s written for end users at a workplace, it’s a useful guide for managers who are new to the idea of BYOD and want to get a grasp of the major issues that can arise when employees bring their own devices to work. I expect that we’ll be using this in our consulting work and recommending it to our customers.

There’s a special deal if you buy it today (Wednesday, April 17, 2013): it’s selling at a dollar off — a mere CAD$3.03 at Amazon.ca, and USD$2.99 at Amazon.com.

BYOL: Bring Your Own Liabilities

Mobile technologies bring new capabilities, but new complications as well. The CIO article BYOL: Bring Your Own Liabilities points out that the dual nature of BYOD devices — owned by the employee, but used part of the time on behalf of the company (and possibly subsidized) — present some new potential legal issues, whether or not your organization has a formal BYOD program. The article lists a number of ways you can reduce the risk of legal exposure in your BYOD program; the article goes into more detail, and we’ve summarized the main points below:

• Policy: The article says that a policy defining your organization’s BYOD program is most important element of any BYOD strategy, and we’re inclined to agree. Such a policy should clearly define how your BYOD program will operate, specify the risks and responsibilities of the organization, employees and third parties, and define acceptable technologies and acceptable use. Most of it shouldn’t have to address legal issues, but having such a policy will help reduce your legal exposure. (By the bye, we’re pretty good about crafting mobile device policies, and we even have a guidebook to help you build your own.)
• Liability issues: Figure out whether your organization or your employees are liable in certain cases, such as: Who’s responsible for misplaced or stolen devices? Who’s responsible in the event of a malware attack? Who pays for support?
• Licensing: Are the apps on mobile devices — both company- and employee-owned — properly licensed?
• Insurance: Will your organization’s insurance policy cover devices that it doesn’t directly own or lease?
• Data security: As the article says: “Two topics generally colour the legal framework in the context of data security; these are confidential information and litigation obligations, both of which are concerns for any mobility based system.”
• Confidentiality: We take our mobile devices (especially our smartphones) everywhere, and sooner or later, they’ll get lost or stolen. You need to consider the implications of missing mobile devices, from the loss of your organization’s sensitive information, to inadvertent breaches of confidentiality agreements with other parties, to remote wipes, to the consequences of remotely wiping an employee’s personal data. Along with the issues that come with confidential or sensitive data on the device, there’s also the issue of such data off the device, stored with third-party cloud services like Dropbox.
• Discovery obligations: Data stored on mobile devices used for work may be subject to electronic discovery, the pre-trial phase in litigation where each party can get evidence from the opposing party. You may need to take measures to keep work and personal data separate, keeping in mind that your organization can’t object to producing some information in the discovery process simply because it has some personal employee information mixed in.
• Privacy: One reason to try to keep work and personal data separate is to preserve employee privacy, especially when backing up information. Ideally, you want to back up only the work-related information and store no personal employee information (such as their address book or photos) on your organization’s backup system.
• Surveillance and tracking: The ability to remotely track a device is a useful thing to have when it’s lost or misplaced, but it can be a cause for concern about its use for tracking employees. The article recommends the use of a data surveillance policy that clearly spells out how devices will be tracked, and if your organization will record information stored or transmitted by the device.

BYOD and Shadow IT

From an earlier article:

Shadow IT sounds like some kind of future slang that [William] Gibson would’ve coined, but it’s an office term referring to the set of applications and systems that are used in organizations without that organization’s approval, and especially without the approval of the IT department. It’s usually the result of one or a handful of employees discovering an application, service or system that solves a problem in a way that seems more effective, expedient, and more free of red tape than if it were solved by IT. Shadow IT usually starts off as an ad hoc solution, but if it becomes popular within an organization, its use can become standard practice, even without the approval or oversight of the IT department.

When people talk about shadow IT, they usually talk about the security issues. Mike Foremen in Huffington Post UK writes about another equally important issue: the creation of data silos, where information vital to the business lives in places where it can’t be found.

Each of three videos he found focus on one Samsung-specific software feature:

• Sound shot: a feature that lets you record the surrounding sounds as you take a photo, so you can do things like take a photo of a busy downtown square and include the sounds of the traffic and people.
• S Translator: lets you speak one language into the Galaxy S4, hit a button, and have the S4 repeat what you said in another language. It reminds me of the idea behind the “Mandarax” in Kurt Vonnegut’s Galápagos.
• Group Play: links together several S4s so that they play the same song, in sync. I’m not sure how useful this is, but I can see some potentially interesting uses for flash mobs or group activities.

There are a couple of notable things about these ads:

• There’s no mention of or poking fun at the iPhone or its dedicated fanbase. Keep in mind that these ads are “international” ones; they may yet go with the iOS-bashing tack with the ads for North America.
• These ads show people enjoying the Galaxy S4 user experience. Each ad basically says “Hey, look at this feature: here’s what it does, and here’s how people are enjoying it”. Rather than simply listing features or showing off specs (which are useful to most people), the ads tell a story.

Here are the ads:

Sound Shot

S Translator

Group Play

Meanwhile, Android Central has uploaded this ad to their YouTube channel. This one does a lot of ooh-ing and aah-ing over the hardware:

Galaxy S4 Teaser

Today’s BYOD infographic is brought to you by ReadWrite and Intel and includes some interesting figures:

Here are the figures from the infographic:

• 38% of US CIOs were expected to support BYOD by the end of 2012.
• 82% of surveyed companies in 2013 allow some or all workers to use employee-owned devices.
• 74% of IT leaders believe “BYOD can help our employees be more productive”.
• 57% minutes: The average amount of time reclaimed per worker per day in an Intel BYOD program.
• Less than 1/4 of all IT managers view cost savings as a key benefit of BYOD programs.
• “Employees Satisfaction” and “Productivity” are the prime benefits to 58% of surveyed employees.
• 49% of U.S. IT managers “Strongly Agree that BYOD Improves Worker Productivity”.
• BYOD boosts mobile: “BYOD could also expand the total number of mobile users substantially — by 50% or more” (Gartner).
• Security is biggest BYOD objection worldwide: it’s viewed as the #1 BYOD concern in the USA, Germany, South Korea and Australia.
• 1/3 of IT Managers list “Lack of compatibility with our IT infrastructure” as a key reason for outlawing BYOD, but concerns vary by country and platform.

BYOD in the Big Apple

Creative Commons photo by Ed Sweeney. Click to see the original.

The New York Post (yeah, not the best of papers, but they’re quoting Cisco’s BYOD Insights 2013 report) posted a quick report on New Yorkers’ use of mobile phones for work, which includes these figures:

• 91% of Gothamites surveyed say they use their mobile phones for work.
• Only 11% of the surveyed receive a stipend for their BYOD devices.
• 18% of New York employees bringing their own devices to work will be reimbursed by their employers for a lost or damaged phone.
• 70% of NYC employees who use their smartphones for work are expected to read emails after working hours.
• Across the United States, the professions with the highest rates of personal smartphone use at work are in education (95%) and tech (90%). The profession with the lowest rate is retail.

Creative Commons photo by Miguel Pires da Rosa. Click to see the original.

Other findings from Cisco’s BYOD survey:

• 9 in 10 Americans use their smartphones for work.
• 40% don’t password-protect their smartphones.
• 51% connect to unsecured wireless networks with their smartphone.
• 52% disable their smartphone’s “Bluetooth discoverable” mode.

Cisco’s report, BYOD Insights 2013, which you can download for free, concludes with this final thought:

The number of Americans with smartphones is steadily increasing. Adults who reported owning a device they classified as a smartphone jumped 12 percent in 2012 according to the Pew Center. As that number grows and more Americans return to the workforce in the recovery from this Recession, BYOD will cause security breakdowns and cost companies money.

Knowing some of your employees’ smartphone habits can help you prepare to mitigate the impact of those events.

Dell: Half of Firms with BYOD Policies Have Had a Security Breach

Creative Commons photo by Nick Carter. Click to see the original.

Dell’s Executive Director of End User Computing, Margaret Franco, reports that half of their customers whose BYOD policies allowed users to bring in any mobile device they want to work experienced a security breach. That’s hardly a surprise; hete at CTS, we recommend specifying a set of supported BYOD platforms and devices and matching them with the appropriate apps, utilities and practices. You can’t go “anything goes” with BYOD; that’s just asking to give your IT department — if not the whole company — a big bag of hurt.

Create a Mobility Policy, Educate Your Employees About It, and Get Them to Sign Off On It

“Whatever your BYOD policy is,” goes the second of four tips in the PC World article When alien hardware invades: 4 keys to BYOD success. “you should define it in a written document.” It’s an important point, and one with which we agree. Here at CTS, we recommend that you…

Create a mobility policy.

This is a written set of rules governing the use of mobile devices for work, whether the devices are owned by your organization or by your employees, and covers company-liable, COPE, BYOD and everything in between. Note that this is something you can’t do in isolation, but in consultation with your employees: not just the IT department, but also management, various business units, HR, legal and so on. You should also consider the various levels of mobility in your company: the needs of “road warriors”, who spend most of their time on the road, vs. your office core, who spend most of their time at the office (but can easily spend half their time away from their desks at meetings) differ greatly, but they both need to be accounted for. CTS has a Mobility Policy Guidebook to help you figure out what should go into your organization’s mobility policy.

Once you’ve created a mobility policy, educate your employees.

Mobility policies can sometimes be lengthy documents, and it’s all too likely that people will simply glance at at, say “I’ll read this later” and file it away in that Place Where Things Are Never Heard From Again. This is bad, especially considering that mobile technology is a new, rapidly-changing thing, and BYOD is also a new, rapidly-changing thing; it’s likely that many of your employees’ assumptions about mobile devices at work are wrong (consider the case of Amanda Stanton, whose employers remote-wiped her iPhone). Hold info sessions to explain the broad strokes of your mobility policy, and more importantly, the rationale behind the rules in the policy. CTS’ Mobility Policy Guidebook not only helps you set up the rules in your mobility policy; it also explains the rationale behind them.

Have your employees sign mobility agreements.

These agreements, typically handled by HR, specify the terms and conditions by which employees agree to abide. Some organizations use a single agreement, while others break them up into documents such as:

• a Mobile Acceptable Use Policy agreement,
• a Mobile Remote Wipe Policy agreement,
• and in the case where the organization helps cover part or all of an employee’s mobile bills, a Mobile Reimbursement Policy agreement.

Once again, CTS’ Mobility Policy Guidebook covers these.

Want to know more about CTS’ Mobility Policy Guidebook? Contact us at sales@ctstech.net!

Samsung Knox

Samsung’s courtship of the enterprise market continues with the announcement of Knox, their containerization solution that lets you split your phone into two different sides: one for work, and one for the rest of your life. Each side is under a completely different “jurisdiction”, with your company’s IT department having control of the work side, while you have full control over the “rest of your life” side, free to install whatever apps you want.

Here’s an excerpt from an article on Knox written by a Samsung partner, Centrify:

…even in the case that the device itself has no unlock passcode and no corresponding security policies, the secure container of business apps on the phone cannot be accessed unless the appropriate passcode is entered. And inside the container the user is able to share data between business apps (e.g. copy and paste text from an email into a CRM record), but corporate IT would of course not want data inside the container copy-and-pasted onto a non-container app such as Twitter or Facebook — i.e. data leak prevention. And of course corporate IT should have the ability to wipe the container if the device is lost or the employee leaves the organization, but not delete music, photos, personal apps, etc. that the employee put on the phone.

Knox works on any SAFE (SAmsung For Enterprise) -certified devices. Currently, there are only two such devices: the Galaxy S III and the Galaxy Note II.

Ten Ways to make BYOD More Appealing to Users

TechRepublic have ten suggested ways to make BYOD more appealing to those users who are still a little reluctant. The full details are in the article, but we thought we’d list those ten ways in summary:

1. Tell them that BYOD means more freedom. BYOD allows users the freedom to do their work anytime, and in any place. This means that they can be productive while on the go, whether they’re on their commute, while waiting to pick up their kids from school, or doing other things that wouldn’t be possible in the age before mobile technology. The TechRepublic article also talks about more time to use social networks, but we feel that the real benefits come from getting stuff done and not being stuck at the office.
2. Allow longer work lunches. If employees take their devices to lunch, why not take advantage of those “any time, anywhere” capabilities and let them take longer lunches — which are often used to run mid-day errands — as long as they’re being productive.
3. Provide software incentives. ”More than likely, your company has access to software titles at lower prices than do your employees. Why not extend these prices to your employees as an added incentive for BYOD?”
4. Allow them to take advantage of deals through hardware purchases through the company. “Similar to the software incentive, you probably can allow your employees to purchase the hardware they will use in the BYOD program through your own channels.”
5. Give them an end-of-year bonus. “You’ve saved money by having your employees bring in their own devices. There is no reason why you can’t pass on a fraction of those savings to participating BYODers.”
6. Offer more telecommuting opportunities. Give BYODers the opportunity to occasionally telecommute.
7. Offer cloud storage. “If your company has the resources, offer BYOD employees an internal cloud storage option. This solves a number of problems. It allows your employees easy access to the data they need to work with and enables them to store personal data in a safe cloud environment.”
8. Subsidize their phone plans. “For those BYODers using their personal smartphones for business, it makes sense to compensate their phone plan somewhat.” A number of organizations do this as part of their mobility policy, and we expand on this in the CTS Mobility Policy Guidebook.
9. Give free (limited) support. A limited amount of support (say assistance getting connected to corporate resources such as email and intranet) is helpful, and keeps them productive.
10. Tell them about the security benefits. If you can offer BYODers added security on their devices — say, through an MDM application installed as part of your BYOD program — tell them about those benefits.

We’re taking a close look at the numbers reported in the Mobile Enterprise Report put out jointly by iPass and MobileIron. Based on a survey of IT pros at the director level or higher (50% of whom worked for companies with more than 1,000 employees) conducted from December 2012 and January 2013, it reflects what we’ve been seeing in the enterprise.

If you talk to enough IT pros and sysadmins, you’ll eventually notice the same story being told again and again: there’s a lot of rule-bending when it comes to the Big Kahunas at a company. Of the people surveyed, nearly have said that they’ve made exceptions to the rules for provisioning mobile devices to “specialized members” of the company. By “specialized”, they probably mean “people with the power to fire me, or at least make my work life very, very miserable”.

Some other notable stats and observations from the report:

• BYOD is catching on:
  • 56% of respondents say they changed their corporate guidelines in the past year to be more accommodating of employees’ personal devices.
  • 81% accommodate personal devices in the office.
  • 54% have formal BYOD policies, and more organizations allow BYOD than have policies for it.
• Phone preferences:
  • The iPhone surpassed BlackBerry devices as the most popular in terms of corporate IT support.
  • Windows Phone 8 gaining favour of BlackBerry 10? 45% of IT managers surveyed plan to support Windows Phone 8 devices; 34% plan to support BlackBerry 10.
  • Tablet usage is up in all non-executive departments, especially legal, HR/administration and finance/accounting.
  • The iPad is the top choice of tablets, with support from 73% of the companies surveyed.
• Also noteworthy:
  • 55% of the companies surveyed had mobile device security issues last year, mostly having to do with lost or stolen phones.
  • 55% of IT managers use wifi connectivity apps for productivity purposes. Wifi apps were the most widely-used out of 10 different types of enterprise mobile apps. The second most widely-used: secure email.

We’ll take another look at this report in a later article. In the meantime, if you’d like to read it for yourself, you can download it from this page. (It’s free; you’ll just have to provide some contact info.)

Citrix’s Mobile Usage Survey: We’re Really Attached to Our Mobile Devices

A survey  commissioned by Citrix and conducted by Wakefield Research shows the level to which people are attached to their smartphones. Among the numbers gathered from over 1,000 adult Americans in January 2013 were:

• Mobile devices as mealtime reading material: 69% of the mobile device owners surveyed said that it had been a day or less since they last ate a meal without checking their mobile device. It may seem like a phenomenon particular to Gen Y, but with 66% of them agreeing with that statement, they’re behind Gen X (68% said that this was true) and the Baby Boomers (71%).
• Mobile devices as blackmail material: Among the mobile device owners in the survey who recorded an embarrassing video of someone in 2012, 52% are saving it to share with others in 2013. That’s a bit creepy.
• Mobile devices as gauges of patience: 30% of survey respondents said that they wouldn’t wait longer than 8 seconds for a page to load, after which they’ll move onto something else. 72% of respondents said that slow downloaded would cause them to abandon downloading a large file.
• Mobile devices as communication devices? Maybe not: 64% of the people surveyed said that the primary reason they used a mobile device was “to keep myself from being bored”. Half that number — 32% — said that the primary reason was “to bring friends or family together”.

For more, see Citrix’s news release, titled Survey Shows Americans Treat Mobile Devices as Best Friends.

Citrix Bytemobile’s Feb. 2013 Mobile Analytics Report: What Mobile Traffic Data Tells Us

Bytemobile — now called Citrix Bytemobile since they were acquired — recently released a mobile analytics report that looked into mobile subscriber behaviour and QoE (Quality of Experience) for mobile services. Based on data traffic from “a global cross-section of Citrix Bytemobile customers’ mobile networks”, it contains a number of findings, including:

• On any given day, out of every 10 smartphone subscribers:
  • 6 will look up information: news, weather, maps, blogs
  • 4 will open a web browser
  • 4 will use a social network app
  • 3 will use Facebook
  • 3 will engage in ecommerce
  • 3 will be be served a mobile ad
    
  • 2 will visit the App Store
  • 2 will watch mobile video content
  • 1 will use iTunes
  • 1 will use YouTube
  • 1 will use Twitter
• Data usage:
  • Approximately 50% of mobile web pages download in 8 seconds or less across wireless networks worldwide. Remember that 30% of the respondents from the Citrix survey mentioned above said that they wouldn’t wait longer than 8 seconds for a page to download before moving on to something else.
  • Tablets generate more data than smartphones; iPads, triply so. On average, a network-connected tablet generates 3 times more data than a smartphone, and iOS tablets generate more than 3 times the data of Android ones.
  • Video accounts for more than 50% of total mobile data traffic on wireless networks, even though only 20% of mobile subscribers watch video on their devices. Mobile video watchers watch an average of 2 minutes of video at a time, which is double that of the Bytemobile Mobile Analytics Report from February 2010.

For more, get Citrix Bytemobile’s February 2013 Mobile Analytics Report (free registration required).

IDC have released their 4Q 2012 data from their Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker, and here’s what it has to report:

• 227.8 million mobile operating systems units were shipped in 4Q 2012. 159.8 million were Android and 47.8 million were iOS, and together, they have 91% of the mobile OS market.
• 4Q 2012′s mobile device shipments were up 70.2% from 4Q 2011.
• Samsung accounts for 42% of all Android smartphone shipments.
• Nokia accounts for 76% of all Windows Phone shipments.
• iOS showed double digit growth for 4Q 2012 and the entire year, but its year-over-year growth has slowed compared to the rest of the market.

Here’s how their numbers break down for 4Q 2012…

…and here are their numbers for the complete year of 2012:

For more, see the summary of their Worldwide Quarterly Mobile Phone Tracker.

How IDC’s 2015 Mobile OS Share Predictions are Holding Up

Here’s a chart based on IDC’s predicted mobile OS market share for 2015:

They might be a little off with their prediction for Windows Phone’s share of the market.