Google rebrands Android for Work as just Android

Google today announced that it’s changing the names of its services for pushing Android apps in enterprises. Google Play for Work, a tool that organizations can use to distribute public and private Android apps to employees’ devices, will now be called just Google Play. Android for Work, which keeps business and personal apps and content separate, from here on out will be just Android.

“With platform-level support shipping with every GMS [Google Mobile Services] compatible device, Android for Work and Play for Work have become a core part of Android and Google Play,” as Google software engineer Adam Connors and product manager Travis McCoy put it in a blog post. “We think this change better reflects the built-in nature of enterprise features of Android and our commitment to enterprise mobility.”

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A new Google support page is more direct about what’s changing (which is not much, really).

“The simplified branding reflects that the APIs [application programming interfaces] these products use have been integrated into Android and Google Play, respectively, and the separate branding is no longer needed,” the page says.

Google first announced the two products in June 2014 at its Google I/O developer conference and released an Android for Work app and the Google Play for Work app store in February 2015. Less than six months later, Google said more than 10,000 businesses were testing, deploying, or using Android for Work.

The Google Play for Work “shop” of apps is still online, but the Android for Work app — designed to enable services on devices that couldn’t natively support them — is no longer available on the Google Play Store.

Today’s move comes two months after Google put Google Apps for Work (now G Suite), Google Cloud Platform, and other products under the new Google Cloud name.