Switch User Profiles on Jelly Bean

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It has been recently reported that there’s hidden code in Jelly Bean that allows it to support multiple users. This means that you can have multiple users log in and out of the phone like on desktop operating systems. Despite being almost completely coded, there wasn’t any discussion about it during Google I/O.

That doesn’t mean it isn’t usable, because it definitely is. XDA Recognized Themer zanderman112 has written a very basic tutorial on how to get multiple user support on Jelly Bean ROMs. While written in the Sprint Samsung Galaxy S III forums, it should be universal for all AOSP Jelly Bean ROMs. To prove this, XDA Member Advocate Admin and Spirit of XDA egzthunder1 was kind enough to test this on his ASUS Transformer TF101 and it worked.

To get a second profile, users must first be rooted and have Terminal Emulator installed. From there, users open Terminal Emulator and type the following:

su

pm create-user test

In this example, a second account is created with the name test. You can switch out test in the code for whatever you want the second account to be named. Then, hit the power button until the boot menu pops up and you should be able to switch to the second profile. The second profile is limited compared to the original profile and the limitations can be best seen in the settings menu. It is not particularly useful, but definitely really cool. As zanderman112 explains:

At the moment, this isn’t extremely usable, ie texts from the primary user’s still show in the 2nd test account. But, with the right launcher installed, and hiding the apps from the drawer on the 2nd account, this can still be usable in its current form. My suggestions:

1.) Label the 2nd user Guest

2.) Use Nova or Apex as the launcher for the Guest user, and hide all of the apps you want(texts, social media, email, etc) from the app drawer.

3.) Setup a security lockscreen on the primary user to prevent Guests from gaining access(each user has different lockscreen settings)

For more info, the full tutorial, and more, head over to the original thread.