Google Play comes to Google Apps: Enterprises can distribute apps internally | Hacker News Reader

Google Play comes to Google Apps: Enterprises can distribute apps internally

thenextweb.com

81 pointsQuekster40 comments

This is huge for business uptake and could, in a few months, start leading enterprises to specify Android only.

Will open up a lot more opportunities for mobile business app startups too.

Mobile in enterprise is often seen as lagging behind consumer use - but senior execs in my experience are already a lot further ahead on mobile use for stats/monitoring than many probably appreciate - getting broader uptake across an enterprise usually stalls at deployment and user support.

In your first sentence, there are two statements. The first is true. I see this as an important step that Google had missed, yet Apple had working (for some value of working) from day one.

The second is unlikely to be true for a very long time, if ever, and is merely wishful thinking. It would equally be wishful thinking if someone thought that enterprises would specify iOS only or SailFish only.

This is perfect timing for a video streaming solution I've been working on.

I'm trying to build a video capture program and a google tv app that talk to each other so I can stream video around our LAN. The video capture box would probably be in the $1000 range. Then each tv that wants to see that stream would only need a $100 Vizio Google TV box and the private android app. Now that I know I can build an app that won't be in the public Play store, but will be accessible easily to accounts on our domain, I can make that app much more specific.

I could see this being really popular with companies who use a lot of TVs for signage. The first thing that comes to mind for me is all the TVs in airports showing departure and arrival information.

This is great. So much better than distributing APKs over email or something of that nature. The ability to push secure updates to internal apps through Google's network is gamechanging.

There is a product called Knappsack that I have been using to help with this problem... www.knappsack.com . Gives you a private app store, cross-platform, open source or SaaS.

Less relevant (unless you're on the free Google Apps plan, or want to do private apps outside a domain) now that this is available, but using Dropbox/GDrive for private app distribution is far less painful than email.

(I imagine it wouldn't be too difficult to build a pseudo-Market over the GDrive APIs for such uses. Might look into that at some point.)

This is going to be incredibly useful for me.

I'm not familiar with the Apple or Windows Phone platforms. Do they have anything similar?

Apple has a B2B program where you can make an app available only to phones registered to a particular organisation. It has not been rolled out worldwide, like the google program appears to be: http://www.apple.com/business/vpp/

On the downside of googles program, it appears to rely on a company using google apps (basically the corporate version of Gmail, which runs under your own domain). I understand not many companies use this - its definitely not as popular as say - exchange.

It seems that google is slowly migrating google apps platform to not just being reliant on using all googles apps/services. IE: Postini users will be migrated next year to Google Apps (but not require to be using gmail).

Slight correction: The enterprise developer program is for distributing apps within an organization: https://developer.apple.com/programs/ios/enterprise/

The B2B program is more for bulk purchase of custom apps.

Gmail is much more popular than exchange. The types of businesses who are chained to exchange are not the type to be deploying custom android apps in house.

Then why on earth did they name it Play?

This is exactly the question I had when they renamed it in the first place -- "play" is an inaccurate term for their intended usage of the store.

How so?

I think they meant play as in playground

Right, which is inappropriate for a business-oriented device or service.

Only if you subscribe to a narrow, business-school centric, "very serious" view of business.

What? While I can certainly appreciate fun in the workplace, that is not the central tenet of most businesses, and even at the places where it might happen to be that way then you're still going to require some "serious" apps, such as for email, chat, remote desktop, server and asset administration, etc.

Why are none of those fun?

Pushing the play button to make it go, perhaps? As in, using the apps is so easy you just "press Play"?

One has to wonder what the problem was with Market.

The rebranding occurred when Google changed it from an Android app store into a one-stop-shop for apps but also books, movies, and other downloadable media.

I took it as a way of making Google's involvement more clear; it's not immediately obvious "Android Market" is Google-related, where "Google Play Store" is.

That seems reasonable. But it explains "Google" more than "Play". (Why not "Google Market"?)

I assume Google decided on "Play" over "Market" for other reasons.

I've been thinking more about this, and it's strange that Microsoft also rebranded their Windows Phone Marketplace to Windows Phone Store. Makes me wonder if focus groups don't like the word "market" for some reason. It's not commonly used in Americanized English, so I wouldn't be surprised if many people are confused by what Market is, in terms of a phone application.

I am sure having just changed the name from "Android Market" to "Google Play", and "Google Docs" into "Google Drive," they wanted to avoid confusing the hell out of people by rebranding one more time for no reason.

The Android Market app store was the biggest part and served as the framework but Google Play wasn't a renaming of the Android Market but rather was created to merge Android Market, Google Music, Google Books, and everything else Google sold to consumers into one store. Android Market wouldn't make sense as a name because you don't need an Android device to buy anything, with the exception of Android Apps, on Google Play (though if you want one you can buy an Android device on Google Play). Google Play media purchases are all playable on your computer.

It's just a fanciful name for their content marketplace. The name making sense is less important than building the association between what the business does and the symbol that is the word.

Sometimes a fanciful name is better than a logical name because it decreases the risk of ambiguity among consumers (and so you don't end up in legal battles over very generic sounding names as can be seen with both Apple and Amazon using App Store). It also means their scope isn't limited by their name and they can move into new markets.

Apple, Amazon, Google, and many others all have company names that make no sense and I vastly prefer that to the more accurate names Consumer Electronics or Search Corporation.

Because they don't just want to sell apps. They want you to get all your digital content from the play store; music, video, ebooks and games/apps. Play seems a fairly good and obvious name for that to me.

Other companies have a more comprehensive cross-platform solution already. E.g., http://www.zenprise.com/solutions/mobile-application-managem... -- not only does this let you deploy apps selectively to iOS and Android devices belonging to specific users/groups in your enterprise, it also tracks all data/files these apps touch on the phone and makes sure that data is killed whenever the apps are removed or the phone is lost/stolen. Also does the same for downloaded email local-store or downloaded email attachments.

If an enterprise is Android-only, the Google solution is OK. If you're really doing a corporate deployment, something like Zenprise is a better way to go.

At what point do people start believing that Google has a strong interest in carving out its own proprietary ecosystem, all their openness "plays" always lead to the same thing: some rhetorical platform used only to advance their private agenda. Chrome and Android will soon be Internet Explorer and Windows of the 21st century.

I'm going to be that guy and ask: why?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troll_(Internet)

I suspected but it's getting really hard to weed them out lately.

This gives companies an easy way to distribute their corporate apps internally where they would previously have to sideload them on employee phones. How is this related to your claims?

They do have an ecosystem but it's built on top of a platform they've open sourced. Also, you are allowed to load apps manually into the phone so you aren't really tied into their ecosystem.

I would love to be able to git clone IE like I can right now with AOSP and Chrome.

It's great, and I absolutely love how I can independently host Google Play and Chrome Store.. oh wait a second.

I'm not sure your sarcasm makes sense.

You can't host either Google Play or Chrome Store, but you can write your own and install apps from them.

There are many other Android appstores around - most phone vendors and carries have one, many large enterprises have their own and there are a number of 3rd party ones.

I don't think there are any other Chrome stores but I suspect that has more to do with the lack of use Chrome apps have.

You can't install a certificate to enable your Chrome to one-click install a user.js from apple.com or Mozilla.org, but you can install extensions from Google.com. That is not an open web.

I won't suggest any non-technical person to use the "open web" you guys want.

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