Oreo was released to the public last August; by Christmas I had a selection of Android 8.0 devices to hand and as of last week only 20% of my Android estate was not running 8.0 or above, one of which was my Note 8 which had been seemingly permanently stuck on 7.1.1 and failed to get any security updates beyond Jan 2018. On Sunday evening however I did one of many weekly manual update checks since the announcement of Oreo for the Note some time back, and finally the upgrade had arrived (with last month’s security update – March 2018) … read more.
Today, with the release of Core 9.7.0.1, MobileIron officially introduce support for work profiles on fully managed devices. Work profiles on fully managed devices (further referred to as managed work profile) is the fourth and final deployment scenario (far-right, pictured below) for Android enterprise and the one I’ve been waiting for since its announcement last year! For those unfamiliar, managed work profile is the equivalent of COPE – Corporate Owned, Personally Enabled – which has also gone by the name of COMP (Corporate Owned Managed Profile), WMWP (Work-Managed Work Profile) and likely other names/acronyms as well. Why is it important? … read more.
Just over a week ago Google released the first Android P developer preview. It’s a good one. On the consumer side, Google introduced a nice slew of features that have been extensively covered by mainstream media, including: The mild design tweaks (it’s all very rounded now) The improvements to notifications New, long-overdue restrictions for the camera(s), microphone(s) and sensors when an app is idle Multi-camera support Display cutout (notch!) support .. unsurprisingly I found myself far more interested in the changes, additions and improvements for Android enterprise that come with P. There are a lot. In fact, it’s … read more.
2018 marks the first time I was able to attend Mobile World Congress. While a few topics appeared to feature heavily across the event – IoT, 5G, AR/VR and connected everything, and others – it was the sheer dominance of Android that truly captured my attention. Between the device launches, the Android Works, the Google & Android “offices” (because it certainly felt like a building within a building), the folks in white Google Assistant overalls roaming around, and Android marketing pretty much everywhere I looked, it was clear Google held nothing back this year. Android as a topic is a … read more.
Today Google announced Android Enterprise Recommended, a certification program for devices that aims to finally answer the age-old question – What devices are recommended for business use? While Google has made an effort in the past to list devices suitable for business use based on support for Android enterprise and zero-touch, there has been no clear set of requirements that guarantee the devices in question offer extended software support, adopt a unified Android enterprise provisioning experience or meet minimum hardware expectations. Partners, resellers and systems integrators all work with customers in the enterprise on a regular basis and will each … read more.
On Tuesday, Google finally announced their intention to deprecate the Android device administration APIs – which have enabled enterprise device management since Android 2.2 Froyo in 2010 – in order to promote Android enterprise (or work profile and managed device APIs as Google refer to them) as the default and only management APIs for Android devices from 2019. In their announcement, Google state device admin will remain supported in Oreo now and through the next major release, Android P. One rather important caveat in Android P however is passcode enforcement will be deprecated ahead of being removed entirely in Android … read more.
