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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 islistening. 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.
Now, on to the evidence:
The First Clue
You can't see it, but there is multi user support in there somewhere.
I was originally clued into the idea of multi-user code already existing by Abhisek Devkota, aka "ciwrl," CyanogenMod's Head Moderator. The guys at CM had stumbled upon some interestingsounding methods named "SetCurrentUser" and "onUserChanged." These methods were found inLockPatternKeyguardView.java, a file for Android's pattern unlock. Here's the whole section:
public void onUserChanged(int userId) {
mLockPatternUtils.setCurrentUser(userId);
updateScreen(getInitialMode(), true);
}
I'm no expert, but this looks pretty straightforward: when the user changes, switch the lock screen over to the new user's lock screen, and redraw the screen so the user can see these changes. It sounds like pattern unlock is listening for a user switch!
There's way more to this than just that one section. Ciwrl also pointed out a few commits to me, and if you start digging through the public AOSP repository, you'll start noticing tons of work related to multi-user functionality. After a bit of work, I've been able to piece together a decent timeline of multi-user upgrades to the AOSP code base.
Source and full article: Android Police
