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I must tell you this first. I do not have much information on this one. However whatever little I found, looks interesting. I would love to know if you are as excited as I am about this!

Among Chrome OS code changes for the 14th of March 2018 was this:

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"Add Chrome OS Account Manager". The description does not give away much:

– Loads Login Scoped Tokens (LSTs) from disk to memory – Persists updates to LSTs to disk Design doc is linked in the bug id. This CL creates the core of Account Manager and its ability to load and persist its state.

Follow up CLs will: – Link it with OAuth2TokenService via an OAuth2TokenServiceDelegate. – Add UI components to modify Account Manager's state.

The bug associated with this change is private. There is mention of a design document as well, which of course, is private. The existence of a design document, however, is exciting. They don't make design documents for small features.

Here is my guess. We will soon see a full-fledged account manager on Chrome OS. Don't be surprised if it looks and acts like Android's account manager.

Now, here is why I decided to write this post.

Child Accounts Coming Back?

I considered making this title of this blog post but later considered not to stretch things till there.

Google recently removed the Supervised Accounts feature and did not leave us with an alternative. Could this be they trying to make it available again in a more robust manner?

I looked the OWNERS file for this new feature. There is one name; Kush Sinha. Googling that name didn't bring much luck because there seems to be a celebrity with that name! However, if you look at the issues that this person has worked on, you will see a couple of mentions of Child Accounts.

It is highly possible that the person who used to work on Child Accounts or accounts, in general, is working a new Account Manager, which may not have any connection to Supervised Accounts. However, it is not impossible either!

We will have to keep an eye on this new feature as it develops in code and moves on to Canary build. I am sure we will get more clues very soon!

Stay tuned!