Android’s upcoming “app clone” feature will make it easier to create multiple accounts

Android 14 Preview 1 came out yesterday, and while Google is doing its best to hide interesting consumer features from this early release (either because they’re not finished or due to a lot of I/O disclosure), that doesn’t stop the web from finding interesting ones. features. “App cloning”is a new feature that appears to be hidden in the shipping Preview 1 build, and Mishaal Rahman, writing for XDA, managed to enable it.

This feature uses Android’s multi-user system to have two copies of the same app, but with different credentials, allowing you to sign in to each with different accounts. Some apps support multiple accounts and some don’t, but this feature will ensure multi-account support for everything. Having multiple accounts would also provide more consistency – each app could work across multiple accounts in the same way, with one icon for account number 1 and a second icon for account number 2. Under the hood, the whole feature sounds a lot like Android for Work. but without the complicated process of setting up a work profile and with the ability to choose which applications you want to duplicate.

You may have seen this feature in some Android skins and third party apps, so this turns it into Android as part of the normal upstream process. As Android system UI lead Dan Sandler once explained at Google I/O, the system UI team’s function cycle is often: “We see a paradigm in the wild, we take it, we learn about it, we make it safer, and then we’re doing our part.”back to the framework so everyone can use it in Android.”

A lot of things are not yet finished in this feature. There is no clear way to make a cloned app other than going through the obscure process of finding the correct settings screen. Once you do this, the Android launcher will not be able to tell the cloned apps from the original ones – the icons will have the same name and the same icons. Android for Work gives duplicate work icons a small briefcase icon, but there’s nothing like that here.

The only big downside to this feature is that Android OEMs can control which apps use the clone feature and hopefully it won’t be abused for no reason. Cloned apps have been working on Android development for a while now, and the Android 13 compatibility definition document mentions a “cloned apps profile”(it looks like you’ll only be able to create one additional cloned app) as a required feature. It is not yet known if this feature will be ready for Android 14 release in the second half of the year, but it is being actively worked on.