I’ve just popped a new article up on the website this evening, and I titled it just a little sensationalist to spark a bit of thought 😀.

Over the course of a few evenings, I built a production-grade, multi-tenant Android MDM platform from scratch. What was initially going to just be a simple node app to put a UI layer over an AMAPI project turned into an exercise into how far I could go without losing too much sleep. What’s running in Netlify now is a working platform with policy management, device controls, enrolment workflows, an AI assistant (AMAPI Commander!), RBAC, licensing, and over 80 API endpoints.

The speed came from leaning into agentic development - using multiple AI models orchestrating each other semi-autonomously across Claude, Codex, and a local Ollama instance, QAing each other's output and testing against the live platform via its own OpenAPI spec. One person. One Mac Mini. Several litres of coffee.

The enterprise mobility vendors we rely on have been building their platforms for decades with large, dedicated teams. The traditional barriers to entry for MDM development justified the licence costs and the long feature request queues, but those barriers are falling; the APIs are public, the frameworks are mature, and this isn't limited to Android - Apple's MDM protocol and Microsoft's device management stack are accessible too.

Organisations today have a lot of smart engineers; how long will it be before they leverage the tools to build something tuned to their exact requirements, faster and cheaper than their MDM licence renewal? How will traditional vendors adapt to competition not only between one another, but the customers they serve also?

The bigger question is what comes next. Chatting with peers, we’ve landed on calling it ACE - Agentic Control of Endpoints. Not chatbots bolted onto consoles, but autonomous agents that manage your fleet from a desired state described in plain language.

The traditional MDM console has had a good run. What replaces it is going to be far more interesting.

Full article with screenshots, technical details, and a live demo you can try yourself:

MDM is dead. Long live ACE? | Jason Bayton

Agentic development is on the rise, agentic control could come next - the enterprise mobility space is not immune.

Until next time!

- Jason