What are Android work profiles?
When you load up your phone, you’ll usually see a collection of business apps like Gmail, Slack, Asana, Docs, and so on. You’ll also see those apps mixed in with your recreational apps like games and social media apps. With work profiles, you will be able to select your business apps and have them sequestered away in a separate profile. You access those work-related apps via a toggle switch. This can help people who don’t want to be distracted while they’re working. It’s so easy to fall into the social media rabbit-hole while you’re trying to get work done. With the profiles, you can have only the necessary apps available to use while being productive. Android work profiles work two-fold; they can also help protect sensitive work-related data. When you have the profile enabled, you will only be able to access data from your business apps when they are toggled on. When off, they won’t show notifications or communicate with other apps. This is a great feature in the case that a person steals your phone. They won’t be able to access your sensitive business data.
Google announced that this feature is going to be expanding to more users next year
Right now, Android work profiles are only available for enterprise customers to use, but in the blog post, Google said that it plans to expand the feature to more people. It stated that it will bring the feature to Workspace users “first thing next year”. We’ve been enjoying some free Workspace benefits because of the pandemic, but we’re not sure if the profiles will be for free users. However (even though Google wasn’t really clear on this), Google plans on bringing the feature to “…anyone using Android for business purposes”. This is going to be a gradual roll-out, so we don’t know how long until the average user will be able to use this feature. Google recently introduced a feature to help separate your work life in Google Calendar. It introduced “Focus Time.” You can schedule an amount of time that you don’t want to receive any conflicting events. This is mostly for if you’re working for a team that shares the same calendar.
