Google has announced an improvement the Google Mobile Management feature in G Suite today. The improvement allows administrators to publish a private app to up to 20 different organizations in their domain. This gives admins more flexibility to deploy a private app to a particular region or a test group as an example.
For those not familiar with it, Google Mobile Management is part of the G Suite business offering that allows companies to have a private Google Play Store that regulates which apps can be downloaded to corporate phones. This also allows for private apps, those not published in the public Play Store, to be available to employees. To this point, the publishing of apps in this private store was across the entire domain. Now admins can be more selective.
Google outlines several advantages that this improvement makes for customers.
- Developers can publish apps to domains other than their own (including developers with personal @gmail.com accounts).
- Developers no longer need to be admins of the organizations they’re publishing to.
- Businesses can more easily delegate app publishing to third-party developers.
- Private app publishing remains secure, because the developer must have the target organization’s Organization ID and an admin must approve any apps targeted to their organization.
The new feature is rolling out now and is likely already live on your G Suite domain. If it isn’t, it should be there later today.
