Managing mobile devices and applications can be a challenge for businesses and partners of all sizes.

Today, our Enterprise Mobility Management (EMM) partners write their own management app in order to enable management of Android devices; we call this a “device policy controller” (DPC) app. A DPC app is essentially an agent deployed by the EMM, with the real value living in the console and back end, which the app communicates with directly.

Now, with our newest tool, the Android Management API, customers and EMMs can manage devices using a server-side API and eliminate the need to write a management app. The Android Management API takes on this complexity so partners can focus on what’s important to their customers and not worry about the underlying Android framework.

Now, creating policies for your device fleet is as simple as creating a Google Cloud project and making a couple of REST API calls. The Android Management API is built around policies, rather than discrete transactions; just tell the API how a device should be managed.

Behind the scenes, Google interprets these policies into a specific set of actions for the target device, and executes those requests using the Android Device Policy app , a Google-made managing agent. Because we provide the managing agent, developers don’t need to handle nuances of the framework implementation, such as which APIs are available or what bugs need to be worked around on given versions of Android.