Google’s ‘Android for Work’ Gives Your Phone a Split Personality

Screenshot: Google

Google has unveiled a new set of applications, online services, and industry partnerships designed to promote the use of its Android mobile operating system in the workplace.

Known as Android for Work, this rather broad effort is meant to drive the use of Android not only on smartphones used inside the world’s businesses, but on digital payment kiosks that serve consumers inside cafes and retail stores. “We believe that Android is the right solution and the right platform to bring mobility at work to more people,” says Rajen Sheth, the father of Google Apps, the company’s suite of office applications, who now oversees its efforts to push Android and Chrome OS, Google’s laptop operating system, into businesses.

Basically, Google is offering a way for companies and workers to securely separate their work apps from their personal apps on a single device. On the same phone, for instance, you run one incarnation of Evernote for personal use and another for business use. Through partner companies, the internet giant is offering a single piece of software that lets businesses and individuals create this separation on existing phones, and in the future, Sheth tells WIRED, handset makers will offer phones preloaded with the software.

With this Android for Work program—which the company first discussed this past summer—Google hopes to challenge Apple, which has quietly pushed iPhones and iPads into the world’s businesses, and Microsoft, whose Windows Phone OS is largely intended for use in the workplace. Like Apple, Google is first and foremost a company that offers products and services to consumers, but through its Google for Work organization, it often repackages its consumer tools for use in the business world.

Using technology it acquired in buying a startup called Divide, Sheth says, Google has built an tool it call the Android for Work app. But that doesn’t really do the thing justice. Sheth describes it as “an app of apps.”

In short, when you run this tool, it creates what the company calls Work Profiles—essentially the ability to digitally separate work applications and data from personal software—while installing a few business-centric-apps and a new incarnation of the Android app store, known as Google Play for Work, that will offer all sorts of other business software

With this new tool, Sheth says, Google hopes to reach the “bring-your-own-device” market, the many people who aim to use a single phone for both personal and work tasks. In the past, he says, it was often difficult for businesses and individuals to securely and reliably separate work data from businesses, but Android for Work aims to change that. It lets individuals access work and personal software through separate usernames and passwords, for instance, and it lets companies remove business software from phones without touching personal data. On each phone, Work apps appear alongside personal apps, but they’re tagged with their own identifying icon (see image above).

In order to push these tools and other business applications onto phones—and get these phones into businesses—Google is partnering with a wide range of vendors, including everyone from enterprise mobile management (EMM) companies—companies that help businesses manage their fleet of mobile phones—to handsets makers like Samsung and HTC and software makers like Salesforce.com and Box.com.

According to Sheth, EMMs—such as MobileIron—are now offering Android for Work software to businesses who wish to use it today, and as time goes on, handsets makers will offer phones preloaded with these tools. Meanwhile, other partners are building apps that will be available through the Google Play for Work store.

Google and its partners have already tested much of this technology with some businesses, including venerable retailer Woolworths and insurance company Guardian Life, and now, for the first time, the same tools are available to the business world at large.