Android 14 Preview 1 got here out yesterday, and whereas Google is doing its greatest 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 an enormous I/O reveal), that is not stopping the Internet from discovering attention-grabbing options. ‘App Cloning’ is a brand new characteristic apparently hidden within the transport Preview 1 construct, and Mishaal Rahman, writing for XDA, managed to allow it.
The characteristic leverages Android’s multi-user system to have two copies of the identical app however with completely different knowledge, 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 characteristic would carry a number of account assist to all the pieces. It would additionally carry quite a lot of consistency to having a number of accounts—each app might take care of a number of accounts in the identical manner, with one icon for account primary and a second icon for account quantity two. Under the hood, the entire characteristic sounds quite a bit like Android for Work however with out the difficult Work Profile setup course of and with the flexibility to choose which apps you wish to duplicate.
You might need seen this characteristic in some Android skins and third-party apps, so that is making it into Android correct as a part of the conventional upstreaming course of. As Android System UI lead Dan Sandler as soon as defined at Google I/O, the System UI crew’s characteristic 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 is quite a bit about this characteristic that is not completed proper now. There’s no clear strategy to make a cloned app apart from going by way of the obscure strategy of discovering the suitable settings display screen. Once you try this, Android’s launcher can not differentiate between the cloned and authentic apps—the icons may have the identical title and icons. Android for Work provides the duplicate work icons a little bit briefcase badge, however there’s nothing like that right here.
The one huge draw back to this characteristic is that Android OEMs can management which apps use the cloning characteristic, which can hopefully not be abused with out a purpose. Cloned apps have been getting Android improvement work for a while, with the Android 13 Compatibility Definition Document mentioning a “cloned apps profile” (that sounds such as you’d solely be capable of create one further cloned app) as a compulsory characteristic. There’s no telling if the characteristic shall be prepared for Android 14’s launch within the second half of the 12 months, nevertheless it’s actively being labored on.