Android 14 Preview 1 got here out yesterday, and whereas Google is doing its finest to cover the attention-grabbing consumer-facing options from this early launch (both as a result of they don’t seem to be completed, or for a giant I/O reveal), that is not stopping the Web from discovering attention-grabbing options. ‘App Cloning’ is a brand new function apparently hidden within the delivery Preview 1 construct, and Mishaal Rahman, writing for XDA, managed to allow it.
The function leverages Android’s multi-user system to have two copies of the identical app however with completely different information, permitting you to log in to every with completely different accounts. Some apps assist a number of accounts and a few do not, however this function would carry a number of account assist to all the things. It might additionally carry a substantial amount of consistency to having a number of accounts—each app might cope with a number of accounts in the identical approach, with one icon for account primary and a second icon for account quantity two. Beneath the hood, the entire function sounds rather a lot like Android for Work however with out the sophisticated Work Profile setup course of and with the flexibility to select which apps you wish to duplicate.
You may need seen this function in some Android skins and third-party apps, so that is making it into Android correct as a part of the traditional upstreaming course of. As Android System UI lead Dan Sandler as soon as defined at Google I/O, the System UI crew’s function loop is usually “we see a paradigm within the wild, we take it, we study it, we make it safer, after which we contribute it again to the framework for everybody to make use of in Android.”
There’s a lot about this function that is not completed proper now. There isn’t any clear approach to make a cloned app apart from going by the obscure strategy of discovering the best settings display screen. When you do this, Android’s launcher can not differentiate between the cloned and unique apps—the icons could have the identical title and icons. Android for Work offers the duplicate work icons somewhat briefcase badge, however there’s nothing like that right here.
The one massive draw back to this function is that Android OEMs can management which apps use the cloning function, which is able to hopefully not be abused and not using a purpose. Cloned apps have been getting Android growth work for a while, with the Android 13 Compatibility Definition Doc mentioning a “cloned apps profile” (that sounds such as you’d solely have the ability to create one further cloned app) as a compulsory function. There isn’t any telling if the function can be prepared for Android 14’s launch within the second half of the yr, but it surely’s actively being labored on.
