This week another short post. Not just because I missed blogging during my vacation, but mainly to create awareness for a very interesting and often requested feature. That feature is the app inventory for corporate-owned Android Enterprise devices. Until recently the app inventory was not available for corporate-owned Android Enterprise devices, but that has changed. With the recent Microsoft Intune service release (2307), Microsoft has now made some changes to app management and app inventory. Those changes are actually triggered by Google, as Google has started deprecating features and methods of the Google Play EMM API. And even though there are alternatives within that API available, the general advise is to move to the modern Android Management API. That’s exactly what Microsoft is doing and what introduces some (nice) changes to Microsoft Intune. This post will provide a brief overview of the app inventory for corporate-owned Android Enterprise devices.
Experiencing app inventory for corporate-owned Android Enterprise devices
When discussing corporate-owned Android Enterprise devices with organizations, one of the discussion subjects was always around the non-existing app inventory. So, the latest Microsoft Intune service release (2307) at least takes that discussion away. For corporate-owned Android Enterprise devices, an app inventory is now available that includes the system apps. That does make the inventory of apps a bit clogged, as for a single device that can easily mean a total of 350+ apps. So, it will be important to apply the required filtering, and potentially sending the inventory data to a different location (like Log Analytics). The app inventory is available within the total overview that’s available via Apps > Monitor > Discovered apps (as shown below in Figure 1) and within the per device overview that’s available via Devices > All devices > {Specific device} > Discovered apps. Below is an example that shows the installed Microsoft apps on the corporate-owned Android Enterprise devices.
Important: It can take up to 24 hours for app information to populate the report and the refresh cycle for the app information is every seven days from device enrollment.
Note: At the moment of writing I haven’t yet seen the inventory of corporate-owned devices with Work Profile.
More information
For more information about discovered apps on Android Enterprise devices, refer to the following docs.
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