What is Android Enterprise?
I want to welcome you to this course and provide a bit of background on the market opportunity for enterprise apps on Android. The opportunity for Android in the enterprise market is larger than ever.
There are 1 billion smartphones around the world being used for business in some way. According to IDC, over 75% of those devices run Android.
And while we may think of Android as the smartphone that we keep in our pocket as developers, Android encompasses a broad variety of special-use devices within enterprises, too.
From dedicated devices for front-line workers in a store or in the field to premium phones and tablets for office employees and health care workers, a wide variety of use cases can be supported with Android.
Whatever industry you work in, there is an Android device that can get the job done.
So how does Android actually achieve all these goals?
What does the platform offer to cover every worker and every use case in a deployable and secure manner? The answer is Android Enterprise. Android Enterprise is an assortment of Android security and management features, along with Cloud APIs that enable app developers to build the most effective apps and workflows for any enterprise scenario.
To complement these platform features, Google also partners with a number of system providers, known as Enterprise Mobility Management companies, or EMMs, that utilize many of Android’s enterprise features to provide an out-of-the-box management solution to many IT organizations.
Let’s dive deeper into some of those features. Security is one of the first areas we hear concerns about when discussing expanding mobility to enterprise employees.
This is especially true when we start talking about mobilizing workers that are handling sensitive data, like customer records, financial data, or intellectual property.
Android takes a defense-in-depth approach to security to provide comprehensive protection. Those layers go from the hardware to the OS platform to Google Play Protect and, finally, to Android Enterprise’s management APIs.
Android devices utilize a Trusted Execution Environment, or TEE, to run security-sensitive operations, such as PIN verification, cryptographic key storage, and Verified Boot, to ensure devices haven’t been compromised.
Developers can take advantage of those tools and integrate them with their own apps. And we’ll talk more about that later in the course.
The Android operating system enforces encryption by default and isolates applications through sandboxing using SELinux.
Google Play Protect brings together on-device app scanning, along with cloud-based application analysis and machine learning, to combat Potentially Harmful Applications or PHAs, from being installed onto Android devices.
Finally, Android Enterprise’s management APIs allow an organization to enforce their IT policies onto a device and even lockdown device settings to provide additional control over devices used within the enterprise.
Now, security is fantastic, but only when coupled with consistent management. In conjunction with the advanced security features we’ve discussed, Google has also invested heavily to ensure that the management of mobile endpoints is as easy and straightforward as possible.
At the core of making management easy is centralizing capabilities so overall fleet management can be accomplished with as little overhead as possible.
Google has created the Android Management API to empower EMM providers to build a wide range of reliable, easy-to-use tools to manage the enterprise deployments of Android.
As part of centralized management, admins can decide whether to establish a work profile. This creates a separate space on the device for enterprise applications to be installed, away from any personal apps that the end-user may have installed.
Whether devices are corporate-owned or the company supports BYOD, or a Bring Your Own Device policy, the work profile allows end-users to install their own apps without putting corporate data at risk.
IT can decide whether to allow end-users to share data between personal and work apps or fully separate work data from personal.
IT can also delete the work profile, effectively removing all corporate apps from the device without wiping the device in its entirety.
For company-owned devices, IT can also use the work profile to provide data segmentation while having control over broader device policies, like factory resetting the device or establishing application allow or disallow lists.
Finally, IT can also choose to fully manage the device without any personal apps or lock the device into a kiosk to support using an Android device for a specialized purpose.
Beyond establishing the ownership and app model for enterprise devices, Android Enterprise offers a variety of other tools that can help scale the deployment of Android within an organization.
These include a streamlined enrollment experience for devices using zero-touch. Administrators can automatically push apps and app updates to devices over the air using Managed Google Play and restrict user installation of apps to only Google Play. Both developers and IT can remotely configure enterprise apps over the air. We’ll talk more about that later in the course.
IT can control via an allow or disallow list the installation of apps onto a device. They can set custom data loss prevention policies and control information sharing between a device’s work and personal profiles and, finally, have control over the accounts that can be added onto a device.
These tools offer great flexibility for IT in terms of tailoring a device’s behavior to their needs. But that change in behavior can cause apps to behave in an unexpected manner, particularly if developers don’t account for it.
We’ll cover some more of these details later in the course. Building apps for enterprises isn’t that different from building a regular app. But being familiar with what Android Enterprise has to offer and applying best practices when using them will make your app integrate more seamlessly with the workflow of an enterprise.
In the following videos of the series, we will dive deeper into the most popular Android Enterprise features. We will focus on best practices when building enterprise apps and how to ensure that your existing apps are enterprise-friendly.
We will also dive into some crucial user experience decisions and best practices, following the material design guidelines, and how they should be applied for enterprise scenarios.
We encourage you to also try out the codelabs throughout the series to build some hands-on experience and be ready to build the best apps for your enterprise. Thanks. We hope you enjoy the course.
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Originally published at https://technotechy.com on February 6, 2021.
