Google Splits Up Your Android Phone for Work and Play

Ariel Zambelich/WIRED

Google wants to split the personality of your Android phone.

On Tuesday, at its Google I/O conference in San Francisco, the company said that the latest version of its Android mobile operating system will let you run both business and personal apps on the same phone while at same time keeping them separate from each other. “We provide underlying data separation,” said Google senior vice president Sundar Pichai, “so your personal data is isolated from your corporate stuff–and vice versa.”

According to Amit Singh–who oversees business sales at Google–the software used to separate apps is based on technology Google acquired with its recent purchase of a company called Divide. The idea is that, by placing corporate apps in secure software “containers,” Google can allow businesses to manage and monitor them without messing with all the personal stuff on your phone. For instance, if you leave your job at a particular company, Singh told us after Pichai’s keynote speech, the company can erase all your corporate data and apps without touching, say, your personal Gmail account or Twitter app.

For Google, the ultimate aim is to make Android more appealing to businesses that are concerned about securing corporate data on employee phones. Singh calls it the company’s “first major effort” to push Android into the corporate world. As Google stretches into new consumer markets with things like the Android Wear OS for smartwatches and Android Auto for cars, it continues to woo businesses and schools as well. The company has long offered a suite of online applications for corporate users–Google Apps–and it has actively pitched Google Chromebook notebooks at the business the world. Now, it’s doing much the same with Android.

With his keynote speech, Pichai also introduced new technology that will let you run Android smartphone and tablet applications on Chromebooks, and Singh says this too could help push Android into businesses, where Chromebooks are already used–at least to a certain extent. “It’s a very interesting opportunity that could eventually lead to enterprises,” he told us.

In order to separate business and personal apps on phones, Google is releasing new developer tools–application programming interfaces, or APIs–that let companies wrap applications inside protective containers. These tools, Pichai said, will be available with the new version of Android–”Android L”–but he also said the company is working on a way of using the similar tools on previous versions of Android.

Samsung, a company that builds Android phones, has offered similar technology via something it calls Knox, and during his keynote, Pichai said that the phone maker was contributing Knox as open source software to Google’s OS project. “So,” he said, “we can have a consistent story across Android.”