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A review of Android for Work: Dual-persona support comes to Android



If you work in an office environment, you probably know a few people—maybe a lot of people—with two smartphones. One is a personal phone full of pictures of the family, games, social networking, and sports stuff, and the other is a company-issued smartphone full of e-mail, appointments, contacts, and documents. With two phones, your IT department has full control over your work data and can remotely wipe it, and they never get to see your personal pictures or other information. It's a workable setup, but the downside is all the duplication—you have two phones, two chargers, and almost no free pocket space. The other alternative is BYOD—Bring Your Own Device—in which the IT department takes over and installs a bunch of company software to your personal phone.

There is a better way, though, and it's called a "dual-persona smartphone"—a way to have separate work and personal data on a single device. Blackberry was the first to have it baked into the OS in BB10, but in terms of OSes that users actually want to use, it's been left up to often-clunky third-party solutions.

With Android 5.0, Google laid the groundwork for dual-persona support right in the OS with "managed profile" APIs, and now there's a more complete solution from the company called "Android for Work."

Work and personal apps, all in a unified interface


There are multiple ways to do a dual-persona smartphone. Android supports multiple users, so one clunky way to get separate work and personal data would be to just make two users: "Personal user" and "Work user." You'd have separate apps, data, icon layouts, wallpapers, media—basically separate everything. You'd have to log in and out of accounts all the time to view notifications and use apps, though. No one really wants that much separation.

Blackberry 10's dual-persona mode—called "BlackBerry Balance"—used a "spaces" interface, which was kind of like a virtual desktop for phones. You could bring up a menu and press either the "work" or "personal" button, and you would then be whisked away to a separate desktop with a new wallpaper and apps. When you were in one space, you wouldn't see notifications from the other space. This seemed like basically the two-user approach, but instead of having to log in and out, you could just switch users.


Android for Work does things a little differently. While it uses Android's multi-user framework to securely separate work and personal profiles, there is no switching users. Everything lives on a single, unified interface. Through Google Apps and the Google Apps Device Policy app, it takes a personal device and adds an additional work profile that your company owns.
You can have two copies of apps on the single home screen—one personal and one for work, with the work apps denoted by a little red badge. Other than the badges, the apps are identical to personal apps most are already familiar with. Gmail still looks just like Gmail; now it simply has a company-owned user account on it.

You can, of course, arrange the Android home screen icons anyway you want. However, Work apps show up last in the app drawer (after all your personal stuff). We've never once wanted sorting options in the app drawer other than "alphabetical," but now we're thinking some people will dislike the "work apps are last" sorting.

Notifications for each account come in and stack in your notification panel just like anything else. Like apps, work notifications are separate from personal ones, again marked with that little red briefcase badge. Overview separates everything too, allowing users to quickly jump between work and personal Gmail if they want.

Android for Work even adds a profile switcher to the share dialog so users can pick which account they want the shared item to go to.

The project is built on technology from a May 2014 acquisition of a company called "Divide," which made one of the best dual-persona enterprise apps for Android and iOS. There are, of course, limits to what an app can do, so Google brought the feature down to the OS level, allowing for a better integration with Android and the Play Store. Android for Work was announced at Google I/O 2014, where Google also said Samsung would be contributing code from Knox, its enterprise mobility solution, to the project. Apparently something happened between now and then because no Samsung-contributed code was used in Android for Work.

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