Google Finally Gets Serious with Private Channel for Play Store

Brad Shimmin

Summary Bullets:

• Enterprise customers serious about supporting a BYOD policy no longer have to sideload corporate apps in order to support Android devices, now that Google has established a private channel in the Google Play store.

• This move is only one of many coming out of Google and other vendors that point toward a complex blending of personal and professional personas, the ramifications of which won’t be understood or more importantly “managed” for some time.

As is customary, one of the last things I do each day, aside from pour myself a nice cup of coffee is to do quick scan of Google’s collection of blogs, not in hopes of finding the odd nugget of interest interesting but more in fear of missing something major. You have to watch this company very closely. They have a penchant for both understatement and frequent product updates – daily updates. So when I saw the other day that the company had updated its Google Play store, though my first instinct was to ignore the news since Google Play was only a “consumer” service. That was the wrong notion.Google Play is no longer solely the purview of consumer developers. There is now a means by which companies can create a private app store area (Google Play Private Channel for Google Apps) where enterprise users can access and download private apps to their Android devices. This means, the Google Play Private Channel for Google Apps, is important because it allows enterprise developers to distribute, manage, and even earn revenue from their applications directly through the app store itself. Previously, administrators had to walk users through the complicated task of sideloading apps, which makes application updates, security and administration virtually impossible. All of the Google Play Store features (publishing, billing, support, feedback, etc.) are now there for enterprise apps, right alongside consumer apps.