Turning Android into a MS 365 device

During this weeks MS Inspire Conference (i.e. World Wide Partner Conference) - Satya Nadella performed a "demo" of both an Android and Apple devices he referred to as MS 365 endpoints.  In Satya's mind - the phone itself is not as important as the MS apps running on it.

 Basically these were devices that primarily utilized MS apps - so from Outlook, Office & Cortana to Bing and Edge.  

The concept did peak my interest a little and I figured I'd give it a whirl and see how much of a MS 365 endpoint I could make out of an Android device.

 So I started with a 2 year old Moto G4.  This is an entry level device that costs around $200 and runs Android 7.0.   After a complete reset of the device and initial login using my Google account - I started the transformation.

So I started with the MS Launcher - followed by the usual suspects of Outlook, Office Apps & OneDrive.   

 The next tier of apps include Office Lens, Translator, Skype, Cortana, SwiftKey, MS Teams, PowerBI, To Do, SharePoint, MS News & Authenticator

 As you can see MS has continued to expand their portfolio of Mobile apps - all in I had nearly 20 MS apps installed.

 If you search the Play Store for "Microsoft Corporation" there are now over 80 applications out there.  And those range from serious apps like PowerBI or Dynamics CRM or AX to Face Swap or Personal Shopper.  

 Most of those apps are higher quality and more feature complete than their Windows Phone equivalents (if they even existed) ever were.  If shows you how much of a red haired step child Windows Phone really was.  And how little MS really cared about those devices.

 Both OneDrive and the Office apps easily support both Personal and Corp O365 accounts and so it's pretty easy to have a mixed account environment.  Plus with features like Photo upload in OneDrive, all photos immediately get replicated.   

 What MS does not cover are the basics like Phone, Messages, Camera which they should try.  

 And while there have been some rumors out there of MS producing an MS centric Android phone - they'll never go there.  

Bottom line is you can create a very MS centric Android device that will use almost exclusively MS apps.  

 With that said - the opposite is also true.  I have a new Nokia 6.1 running AndroidOne - which is in effect the same pure Android you get on a Pixel device and with the exception of some apps which require an MS backend - so Dynamics, etc - you can easily do all of the same things with native Google or 3rd Party Store apps some of which are better than their MS equivalents.

 The point here is this.  While MS has continued to expand the depth and breadth of their offerings for Mobile - unless you've actually bought in to the MS model - you don't need any of their apps.   



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