Android-For-Work: My thoughts and experience
From around 2-5% market share in 2009, Android has grown to around 78% in 2014. From then onwards, the market share is fluctuating up and down around 80%. It is forecasted that Android will go to 85% share in 2020. It is obvious that the market share is not growing as it grew till 2014.
Google is finding it difficult to grow beyond 80%, in my opinion, is because of the following
- Need for Low cost phones in market
- Brand affinity of users towards iOS and Windows
- Lack of enterprise features (which includes concerns on security aspects)
To gain part of remaining 15% market share, Google has to address these points.
(1) is addressed by Google in 2015 by enabling low cost phones through AndroidOne programme. Though the programme is not as successful as it was expected, phones costing less than 100 USD came into market.
While (2) will be the last one Google may target, Google started filling gaps in Android with respect to (3) by introducing enterprise features from Android Lollipop version as "Android-For-Work". With this, Google is attempting to attract users who use Blackberry or Apple phones for enterprise features (and not due to brand affinity).
Android-For-Work is introduced take care of following needs of users and enterprises
- Allow users to keep personal data and business data separate
- Do not allow enterprise network/device administrators to access personal data
- Allow System administrators to remotely
- install applications
- wipe data
- Configure enterprise user device and applications
- Allow system administrators to restrict users to side-load applications to enterprise partition
- Allow system administrators to restrict users to data from enterprise applications/partition to personal one
At Sasken, we have created a separate test domain and registered with Google Apps for work, one of the EMM (Enterprise Mobile Management) service providers. Other EMM service providers are Airwatch, Blackberry, Centrify, Citrix, Cortado, MaaS360 by IBM, Matrix42, MobileIron, Okta, SAP, SOTI.
With this, we get access to Google Apps for work platform which will enable features such as the following
- create user accounts
- approve applications hosted on Google App Store for work
- Automatic installation or allow users to download & install
- Set policies such as enterprise users can access only specified domains from browser application, camera access is removed, disallow users to uninstall applications
I have configured AFW on my mobile phone and have personal email application and official email application. I find it very convenient because I need not worry about official documents/attachments being downloaded to my personal storage space. Without this, once in a while I need to go through file system to remove official documents.
It is little irritating because even though I have Microsoft word on my phone, I cannot open attachment till I download enterprise Microsoft word. This may be till I install all applications that are necessary [pdf reader, ppt, image viewer,...]. We can configure all the applications required and allow them to be downloaded automatically while configuring a device.
4-5 of us are using enterprise Hangouts as messenger of mobile phone to have discussions over mobile phones in enterprise-friendly way.
Without any inconvenience I can use my phone for office work because I am confident that my enterprise partition can be cleared anytime remotely.
AFW needs complete data to be encrypted. I did not face any problem during encrypting or after encrypting. So, it is safe to go ahead encrypting the data.
AFW has evolved significantly from Lollipop to Nougat. It is definitely in a shape to be used by enterprises with small teams. However, there will definitely be issues (functional as well as stability) till the feature is used extensively and well-tested. Since Google seems to be giving very high focus on security and enterprise aspects, they along with community will definitely improve AFW features in subsequent versions of Android.
Is anyone using AFW? What is your experience and what is your view on AFW?
I will keep posting more on AFW.