Digital Employee Experience (DEX) for Mobile Devices

Ask any IT leader what their DEX platform tells them, and they’ll describe a rich picture: desktop performance scores, session health across VDI, app stability, network quality, compliance posture. Then ask them what it tells them about the iPhone in an employee’s pocket, the iPad on a retail floor, or the Android device a warehouse worker carries all day.

The answer, almost universally, is: nothing.

That’s the problem ControlUp is solving with Mobile DEX, and it’s a bigger problem than most IT teams realize.

Mobile Devices Are Central to the Employee Experience. IT Visibility Is Not.

The modern enterprise workforce is not desktop-only. Retail associates use iPads to process transactions and assist customers. Healthcare workers carry iPhones between patient rooms. Field engineers rely on Android devices to log jobs, access documentation, and communicate with dispatch. Warehouse teams depend on handheld scanners running Android for every pick, pack, and ship.

These devices aren’t peripheral to the digital employee experience — they are the digital employee experience for a significant portion of the workforce. Yet the tools IT uses to understand and improve DEX have, until now, had almost nothing to say about them.

The data backs this up. Mobile device issues are widespread and costly:

• 80%  of frontline workers experience device issues at least once per month
• 82%  report connectivity problems with Wi-Fi or mobile networks
• 74%  encounter app stability issues that disrupt their work
• 61%  struggle with poor battery life during their shift
• 30 min  average resolution time when issues are reported — and most go unreported entirely

These aren’t just IT metrics. A retail associate who can’t process a payment, a nurse whose app crashes mid-round, a field engineer who loses connectivity in the middle of a job, these are customer experience failures and operational disruptions with real business consequences.

The Problem Isn’t Mobile Management. It’s the Fragmented Picture.

Here’s what’s important to understand: this isn’t a gap in mobile device management. Most enterprises already have Jamf or Microsoft Intune deployed, and those tools do an excellent job of enrolling, configuring, and securing mobile devices. The problem is something different.

Today, an IT team using ControlUp has deep, real-time visibility into every desktop and virtual machine in their environment. The moment an employee picks up their iPhone, that picture disappears. Support agents jump between ControlUp and their MDM console, losing context and time. DEX scores only tell half the story. And mobile remains a reactive support problem rather than a proactively managed experience.

What ControlUp Is Doing About It: Mobile DEX via Intune and Jamf

ControlUp is extending its DEX platform to include native visibility for iOS and Android, not by replacing what Intune and Jamf do, but by pulling their data into the same console, the same index, and the same reporting model that IT teams already use for desktops.

The approach is deliberate: extend and improve the existing Intune and Jamf connectors to ingest mobile device data via read-only MDM APIs, map it into ControlUp’s existing index structures, and surface it alongside desktop data in the Real-Time DX Console and DEX portal. No on-device agent required. No new silos. No new tools to learn.

In practice, this means IT teams will be able to:

• See all endpoints in one place — mobile devices visible alongside desktops in the same console, grouped and tagged using the same model IT already uses for desktops
• Understand mobile device health at a glance — battery level, storage, OS version, Wi-Fi and cellular signal, MDM compliance status, encryption, and last sync time
• Monitor managed app inventory — see what’s installed and running across the mobile fleet without leaving ControlUp
• Tag and group by any attribute — including MDM-derived groups and custom ControlUp tags like retail store location or department
• Report across the full estate — mobile devices in the same dashboards and reporting structures as desktops, for IT and finance alike

What About Taking Action on Mobile Devices?

Phase 1 of ControlUp’s Mobile DEX support is focused on visibility or getting the data into the right place so IT has a complete picture. But the roadmap goes further.

Phase 2, still in the planning and scoping stage, is aimed at bringing remote actions — for both iOS and Android — into the same console IT already uses for desktops: syncing a device, locking or locating a lost one, clearing a passcode, or wiping it. How far these go depends on the device’s enrollment and supervision level — Apple in particular restricts many of these commands to supervised, corporately-enrolled devices, and a personally-owned iPhone can’t be remotely wiped under Apple’s own policy. Phase 2 builds on the same MDM-connector approach as Phase 1 (Intune and Jamf), not a separate on-device agent, for either platform.

Why This Matters Beyond IT

Better mobile DEX is not just an IT initiative. It has direct business impact across operations and finance.

Finance teams today often lack timely, accurate reporting on mobile assets: which devices are actually being used, which are sitting idle, whether cellular overage charges could be avoided, and what the true ROI of the mobile estate looks like. With mobile device data flowing into ControlUp’s existing reporting infrastructure, those questions become answerable without building custom integrations or exporting data from multiple sources.

The business case is straightforward:

• Reduce time-to-resolution for mobile support issues by giving agents a complete device picture without switching tools
• Proactively identify devices with declining battery health before they cause shift disruptions
• Reclaim unused mobile licenses and identify idle devices through accurate fleet reporting
• Eliminate redundant remote-control tool costs as mobile support consolidates into ControlUp
• Improve DEX scores that today only reflect the desktop portion of an employee’s experience

The Connectors: Why Intune and Jamf

ControlUp’s initial Mobile DEX support covers Microsoft Intune and Jamf — the two MDMs that dominate enterprise mobile management. Together they cover the vast majority of managed iOS and Android devices in corporate environments, and both have mature APIs that expose the device health, compliance, and inventory data ControlUp needs.

Critically, ControlUp is not asking customers to change their MDM. The connectors pull read-only data from whichever MDM a customer already uses. The value is in aggregation and context — bringing that data into the same place as desktop data, with the same tagging, grouping, and reporting model, so IT finally has one complete view of every endpoint their employees use.

Additional MDM connectors are planned for future phases as the mobile index matures.

Mobile Is No Longer Optional in a DEX Strategy

For years, DEX has been a desktop story. That made sense when most knowledge workers were tethered to a desk. It doesn’t make sense in a world where a significant portion of the workforce — from healthcare to retail to logistics — does their job on a mobile device.

ControlUp’s expansion into Mobile DEX through Intune and Jamf is a recognition that the digital employee experience doesn’t stop at the desktop. It follows employees wherever they work, on whatever device they carry. And IT deserves the same visibility and control over that experience as they have over everything else.

That’s what Mobile DEX is about. Not replacing Jamf or Intune — but finally making their data part of the complete picture.

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Jeff Johnson

Jeff is a product marketing manager for ControlUp. He is responsible for evangelizing the Digital Employee Experience on physical endpoints such as Windows, macOS, and Linux. Jeff has spent his career specializing in enterprise strategies for client computing, application delivery, virtualization, and systems management. Jeff was one of the key architects of the Consumerization of IT Strategy for Microsoft, which has redefined how enterprises allow unmanaged devices to access corporate intellectual property.