That perfect work-life balance is closer than ever
Work-life balance is essential, but the switch to working from home has made it harder than ever to manage. With your laptop and phone loaded with productivity apps, switching off after a long day of meetings and projects can be difficult. Google wants to use Android Enterprise to make swapping between work and personal time a little easier, with expanded availability coming next year.
Work profiles in Android aren’t anything new — in fact, they’re currently supported on any device running Lollipop or higher. Once active on your device, keeping personal apps and data separate only takes a couple of taps, with work-related software cordoned off into a separate tab in your app drawer.
Unfortunately, most people can’t access these settings right now. In order to activate work profiles on an Android device, your workplace’s IT team needs to enable it for your account. That sounds frustrating enough, but for self-employed and freelance workers, it might mean it’s impossible to hide job-related apps without turning to a third-party tool.
Thankfully, Google recognizes the growing shift in employment around the world — not everyone has the backing of an IT department when they’re working out of a spare bedroom, after all. Beginning next year, Android work profiles will add support for unmanaged Google Workspace users. Considering Google wants everyone to be a Workspace member these days, that should include more people.
According to today’s blog post, anyone should be able to split their personal and business apps between different categories once it’s widely available. It’s not the only change coming to Android’s Enterprise program. New APIs for improved update speed, custom tabs for safer authentication than anything offered by WebView, and a new bug bounty program for Pixel devices running enterprise software are among the slew of announcements made today.
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