Yesterday, Google announced through their official blog site that they were offering to their Business, Education and Government customers, a private app store called the Google Play Private Channel. Up till now, if you wanted to publish/host a corporate App Store where you published business-specific apps to internal employees (such as a business intelligence tool tied to your sales system), you either built an ad-hoc system hosted on some corporate web server and or turned to a handful of mobile App Store vendors (Michael Porter covered a number of them in a blog post back in February of this year). The advantage of using the Google Play Private Channel is that it is a familiar and understood method of downloading and updating mobile apps by users. For corporate mobile developers, the private app store brings the wealth of analytical information that developers have come to depend on through the Android Developer Console. While there are a number of limitations such as only a single channel per organization, it is a good first step in addressing the needs of corporate mobile app developers and would expect additional features that meet corporate mobile app management over the coming year. Hopefully, this announcement will also spur Apple to offer something similar. While you can offer iOS apps internally through the Apple Enterprise Distribution process, it suffers from the same set of limitations as offering Android corporate mobile apps through an internal process.
