One of the most useful features Google has added to Android in the past year is multi-user support for tablets, but months later, the feature still hasn’t made its way to smartphones. Based on a response in the Android issue tracker, this long awaited feature might appear alongside Android L. One user took to the issue tracker to express disappointment that Android phones aren’t able to handle multiple users on a single device.
“Storage space of phones is growing, 32GB or even 64GB,” wrote the user. “For example, some families are sharing their phones with their kids for gaming. On a tablet, you can set up an account for your kids and restrict the access on your own apps. My idea is to enable the multi-user feature on phone type devices, with adding an extra restricted account type for kids.”
This isn’t exactly a novel idea, but it is one that many Android users would appreciate. Thankfully, it looks like Google is already on it. A project member swooped in shortly after the issue was submitted to say the following:
“The development team has implemented this feature and it will be available as a part of the next public build.”
It’s too early to say for certain, but this seems to communicate in very clear language that multi-user functionality will be supported in the first public release of Android L. There aren’t any more details, but we’ll be keeping an eye out for mention of multi-user support in future Android releases.
