Multiple User Accounts Are Coming To Android

An intersting development on the Android OS, it seems that the SO finally is getting multiple-user accounts reports Android Police.

Multi-user support is one of the few remaining things a desktop OS can do that Android can't. The "coffee table tablet" use case would greatly benefit from a multi-user setup, as would an enterprise user who wants to keep work and home separate. It's been a top 20 item on the Android bug tracker since the debut of Honeycomb, so there is certainly demand for it.

As we've seen from my previous experiments in sticking my nose where it doesn't belong, Google likes to leave breadcrumbs in shipping products for the astute observer to find, and the multi-user situation is no different. After a bit of research, I can tell you that Google is listening. There is a surprising amount of multi-user work being done on Android - some of it is even working on devices right now.

Before we jump into things, we're going to need to learn some vocabulary. "AOSP" is Android Open Source Project, you should know that one. It's the publicly available code base for Android.  A "commit" is a code push to this code repository. You're supposed to include a helpful comment with your commit, telling people what the new code is supposed to accomplish. This is Android code, so the commit comments are written by Googlers. In other words: they're accurate.