Android lets you instantly hide your work apps when you're not working – here's how

Google will soon make it easier for users to hide their work apps and data, making it easier to strike a healthy work-life balance and boost overall productivity levels.

Google's Work Profile tool makes it easier to separate your work and personal life on the best Android phones, as long as that phone is a work phone. Now, the company has announced that it will be extending access to the tool to more users from next year.

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Currently, the tool is exclusive to Android devices that are managed by an organization through enterprise mobility management (EMM) software. Following news of the announcement from Google's official blog, the tool will extend to people using Google Workspace in 2022, with the ultimate objective to enable anyone using Android to instantly flick a switch and make their business apps disappear.

Remote working has, undoubtedly, benefitted many people across the world. But it's also brought its own set of new challenges: employees can often find themselves online for longer periods of time, often unable to draw a line between work and their leisure time. Google's Work Profile tool helps separate work-related apps and data from personal apps and data, making it easier to disconnect from the working week.

Toggle between work and leisure

Google's tool provides a smart way to partition your work profiles and non-work profiles. Users can have two versions of apps such as Calendar, Gmail, and Drive, which keep a wedge between your work profile and personal profile. Depending on what you're doing, you can then easily switch between the two with a handy shortcut that enables users to “Turn off work apps.”

The potential benefits that users could get from the Google Work Profile tool are two-fold: not only will it help users achieve a better work-life balance, but it should also help organisations by bringing about "improved security for business apps and data.” We'll have to wait until 2022 when Google finally expands the tool to unmanaged devices to see how it actually plays out, but it should be interesting to see how it modifies productivity levels by helping people separate their downtime form their work time.