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Why do mobile admins need Android Enterprise management?

Google is pushing Android Enterprise management and deprecating Device Admin features. Find out why IT should fall in line and migrate to Android Enterprise.

Organizations that manage Google Android devices without the Android Enterprise management program should be ready to migrate their mobile devices to this program if they haven't already.

Any organization that provides its users with Android devices should learn about Google's approach to providing Android management APIs and why it should migrate to Android Enterprise.

Why does IT need to migrate to Android Enterprise?

Android Q's release is likely to come sometime around August, given that Oreo and Pie launched at that time of year. This release will mark the deprecation of a number of APIs that are a part of Android's legacy management program called Device Admin.

The deprecation may not occur immediately; instead, it will occur when IT updates its unified endpoint management or enterprise mobility management's device policy controller applications -- the agent applications that sit on devices to enforce management -- to target Android Q API level.

Organizations that still deploy policies with Device Admin APIs in Android Q will lose important functionality for managing devices as IT updates their agent apps, leaving devices unaffected by IT's management policies.

When IT professionals plan a migration from legacy management to Android Enterprise management, the first thing that they will notice is its enhanced flexibility.

This won't have any effect on devices running any version of Android OS prior to Q. For organizations that run Android Pie and will not upgrade OSes anytime soon, IT doesn't have to worry about this deprecation.

To alleviate this dissonance between the two versions of the OS, IT pros should migrate from Device Admin to Android Enterprise management as soon as possible. Android Enterprise is more secure, simpler to manage and offers far greater consistency for managing devices across a broad range of OEMs.

When IT professionals plan a migration from legacy management to Android Enterprise management, the first thing that they will notice is its enhanced flexibility. This program can manage various ownership scenarios including BYOD, corporate owned and personally enabled or corporate owned, business only. Android Enterprise also supports several provisioning methods, which is a major upgrade from the one process for all deployment scenarios that Android Device Admin requires.

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