On our blog over the last few months, we’ve been singing the praises of the embedded app store. Not only is the enterprise app store an exciting way to unlock the potential of your current product lines—it’s also not nearly as complicated as you think.
As App47 and its customers make the transition to the embedded app store as a key focus of the business, you might expect that there are many changes to make to the platform and to our approach. Fortunately, there aren’t many changes to make. Instead, the embedded app store shares a lot of features with previous App47 offerings—features that provide a better experience for all of our customers.
There are a number of features that demonstrate just how seamless the transition is from the enterprise mobility model to the enterprise machine model. Device registration is one such feature. Under the traditional enterprise mobility approach—the BYOD world—everything was user-centric. Users have login credentials and are able to register various devices on their own. In this model, the security focal point is ensuring that the user in question is supposed to have access to the device and the application.
The enterprise app store model, rather than changing that approach dramatically, simply changes where the authorization point is. This model is device-centric rather than user-centric. Instead of verifying users, we’re verifying devices. The activation is device-focused and turns features and apps on and off on the respective device.
The same could be said of the developer console, a popular feature for enterprise mobility customers. The idea is borrowed from app stores like Apple’s App Store and Google’s Google Play app store. The store offers developers the opportunity to upload apps, metadata, and more, which are then submitted for approval, kicking off a review process for the curators of the store. This is a popular feature in consumer app stores and for enterprise mobility customers, and one that’s being requested with more frequency by App47 customers seeking to deploy embedded app stores. Again, this is a feature that was widely requested on the consumer side and is now seeing lots of usage in the enterprise app store space.
One final carryover from the enterprise mobility space to the enterprise app store movement is the idea that app stores are not just for mobile (Android) devices. We’ve seen traditional enterprise mobility customers start developing apps for desktops and laptops, too—or at least, we’ve seen customer show interest in reaching back into these traditional spaces. Now, with the enterprise app store movement, we’re seeing a renewed focus on apps for legacy devices—think X-ray machines and farm combines—that can easily build off of momentum from the consumer space. CIOs want increased functionality on more than just traditional mobile platforms, and increasingly, they’re getting it.
The embedded app store, then, isn’t new. Rather, it builds off of successful ideas from the consumer app market and from previous, traditional, enterprise mobility customers. So: if you’re considering implementing an enterprise app store at your company, you can take solace in the fact that the transition to this “new” model isn’t as new—or complicated—as you might expect.
