Some enterprises provide their employees with a physical smartphone. So they end up carrying 2 devices with them (1 personal, 1 business). Cophone is a complete replacement for the second one.

What corporation is going to be okay with having their private data stored in someone else’s cloud outside of their control?

Lol, almost all of them. Email, DNS, file shares. Nearly every company today is using the cloud for some component of that...

Even the US DOD is using the cloud for email storage.

True, I guess what company is going to be cool with their employee’s phones being managed by another company, with full access to their data.

Also, The fortune 100 and 500 seem more and more content to use Azure and a mix of their existing infrastructure.

It's not unreasonable to see a solution like this evolve into an on-premise hosted solution.

The cloud definitely is someone else's computer.

All the ones using AWS.

AWS if you are doing it right, makes it quite for any individual at AWS to hack into your data.

All bets off with Cophone.

I might be jaded but I assume the percentage of people "doing it right", among AWS customers, is in the single digit.

Most companies don't care about anything but price. The rest is largely theatre, particularly outside the tightly-regulated sectors like healthcare and banking.

Ok...so what problem does this actually solve? I use my work phone so I can receive work emails, messages, and calls while on the go, away from the company laptop. There are also mobile apps for work tools like task trackers and source control.

If I need the company laptop to access my virtual smartphone, then what's the point? At that point I might as well just use the laptop to do what I need to do. Which defeats the purpose, because it's not mobile.

You won't need to carry your work phone anymore, you can just access it in a browser on your personal phone or on your work laptop without any data being shared between them.

Also you cannot lose your work phone as you would with a physical one. Which might be interesting for your employer if you handle sensitive data.

The longer term plan is to also provide an app that you could install and therefore achieve the same mobility. This would be the only work app you would have to install on your personal mobile phone in order to access your work phone. This is still in brainstorming phase.

This makes no sense. My employer provisions me an work phone so that they manage it end-to-end with MDM, and ensure that it stays physically separate from non-corporate assets. If this product just lets me use my work phone on my personal phone, then it completely defeats the purpose, and my employer might as well just allow use of work communications on personal devices.

The work phone VM here would still be MDM managed, have policies enforced, support remote lock/wipe, etc.

It's a really elegant solution IMO.

So they are using virtual phone on their personal phone?

They could, but they could also access it from they work laptop/desktop. Only a browser is needed.

How is a laptop a substitute for a work phone? The whole reason for work phones is that people carry them everywhere. I am confused by this entire concept, I guess. I mean, I understand what it does; I simply don't understand why.

You don't need to carry a work phone anymore because you can access it on your personal phone, in a browser. Think BYOD, but without mixing the personal data with the business one. And when you're at work, you can access it on your (work) laptop, again by simply opening a browser.

Have you tested getting a corporate MDM to provision onto one of the cophones?

No, not yet, but I'll try it out! Thanks!

You might want to reach for some application which serves some unique functionality without having to leave your keyboard and grabbing your phone.

Probably there are also people who'd like to get rid of their smartphone entirely so this pose as a solution to the ever growing dependency on such devices, be it exclusive bank or other apps, some forms of verification and others.

Admittedly I didn't look into it much but I assume we're talking about physical devices, which likely holds true by the cost of the subscription as well as the considerable challenge of misrepresenting a virtual device for a real one, in which case the service looses any actual appeal.