G Suite is getting a small but time saving feature for admins who have corporate owned Android devices, or devices with a corporate work profile. They will now be able to allow any app to be installed on those devices, saving the tedious work of having to whitelist apps one at a time. It is a change that will be rolling out to all domains over the course of the new few weeks.
To this point, if a corporate owned or corporate work profile device needed to install an app beyond what the admin’s had whitelisted, they had to go and approve that app for that specific device. As you can imagine, this can be time consuming if you have a lot of corporate devices. Now admins can allow any app to be installed but, and this is important, end users will still only see the whitelisted apps in the corporate version of the Google Play Store first. It is only when they search for an app that they will be able to find it and install it.
This will save hours for many admins who are having to go device-by-device in the admin console to approve apps. Further, since the feature is a per-device feature, they can set it up so that non-management users can’t install non-whitelisted apps while management users can.
The feature will only work on devices that have a corporate work profile and it only works on Android devices.
When your G Suite domain receives the new feature, it will be disabled by default so admins will need to go and enable this feature under Device management > App Management > Manage apps for Android devices.
