Shift to Consumer Mobile OSes In today’s environment, all of the modern platforms competing for market share in the rugged mobile space are based on those developed for use by consumer smartphones, including Apple iOS, Google Android, and Microsoft Windows Phone. Even Microsoft’s Windows Embedded Handheld is a forked subset/superset of Windows Phone, which means wherever the consumer platform goes, so does the OS used by rugged deployments in the enterprise. Broken Backwards Compatibility When the rugged world was standardized on Windows, moving from Windows CE 4.2 to 5.0 or Windows Mobile 6.1 to 6.5 was straightforward. But now with Windows Embedded 8 Handheld, Microsoft has broken software backwards compatibility. They moved from a Windows CE-based kernel to the core that powers Windows 8. While it may be a good long-term move, the short-term effect is that existing Windows Mobile apps need to be completely rewritten to move to Microsoft’s next-gen mobile operating system. Additionally, since competing platforms like iOS from Apple (based on Unix) and Android from Google (based on Linux) are also incompatible platforms, organizations with significant investments in their rugged line-of-business apps have many tough decisions to make, whether sticking with Microsoft, moving to a new OS entirely like iOS or Android, or simply not entirely sure what the future might hold. Increased UX Expectations One of the impacts of consumerization is a shift in worker expectations. Now that there is an app for just about anything, your workers will not only expect mobile apps that enable them to do their jobs more effectively, but they also have much higher standards when it comes to user experience. It used to be that enterprise software could get away with a poor UX, but not anymore. This challenge is often compounded when marketing gives your customers mobile apps that have a better experience than what is provided to your employees.

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