Multi-user management (henceforth MUM) has been quietly building out inside Android Device Policy for months now with very little attention on it. With some recent poking around the APK showing the pace apparently increasing, I figured it might be worth talking about.

Huge caveat: most of what follows is observation and assumption. I can see the work happening in the app, I can't see a finished feature, and Google hasn't confirmed anything to me to date.

MUM is the idea of one managed device serving different people - a shared tablet for shift work, a kiosk device staff log in and out of, a device that's multi-assignment rather than one-person-one-phone. Frontline and shared-device fleets have wanted this properly for years.

Android has been able to do this forever, it's had device-owner secondary-user controls since Android 9.0: create and manage a user, switch user, log a user out, enable a logout button, list the secondary users, cache apps between users, etc. Those APIs have sat there largely out of reach of customers due to lack of vendor interest, and an outright snub from the AMAPI team.

That's seemingly changing now.

Over the the last four or so months the footprint of MUM has grown by roughly seven times. The latest beta adds more existing policies taught to work per-user rather than per-device: maximum days without a sync, maximum security-patch age, blocking account changes, app verification. Each one an existing control extended into the multi-user model.

Almost none of it is switched on, though. The bulk of these controls in the current production app are off by default, waiting on a server-side flip that hasn't happened. That's also preventing me from getting hands-on with it to talk about this matter-of-factly rather than a working theory, but hey-ho.

At this point it's well known Android and ChromeOS are converging under the Aluminium product, and shared, multi-user Android lines up closely with what ChromeOS already does - managed guest sessions, session switching, etc. Given the convergence, a chunk of ChromeOS's shared-session policy needs a home on the Android side, and building MUM out now is what you'd do if you were porting that across in preparation.

It could also equally be Google tidying up frontline device support with no bigger plan attached, of course, we simply don't know yet.

If you run shared or frontline devices, I think it's the most interesting thing happening in plain sight right now.

I'll keep watching, and when the switches start flipping I'll cover it more in-depth.

How exciting!

#androidenterprise