My 11 year old nephew needs a smartphone for his bus ticket ... wrong in so many ways - from broken screens, dead batteries, ergonomics ( small 11 year olds have tiny hands and small clothes with tiny pockets) and he reached all these limitations within the first five weeks of the first half term!
Anyway, I had proposed using GOS with a dedicated nephew child profile and a parental primary profile (hence able to control app installs etc).
Lucky for me, my brother ignored me because ... if the GOS phone powers off, runs out of battery or just restarts, then the nephew will need the primary profile PIN before they can do anything - like sign in to their own child profile so they can display their bus ticket ...
So my answer would be, it depends.
If the child must have the phone working for some reason, like a transport ticket, then you will need to treat GOS like an ordinary Android phone and not rely on the beautiful multi profile feature.
Otherwise, I think this is a really good use case for GOS profiles. Furthermore, this limitation could be advantageous if you can have the phone switch itself off at the end of the day since it is impossible to use the phone again without taking it to a parent to pass the initial primary profile login.
So my use pattern would be (detail for those less familiar with GOS):
- Parental Primary Profile (PPP) with Google Playstore installed.
- Child Profile (CP) with PPP/settings/system/multi-users/manage-users/CP/App-installs-disabled.
then, child comes to parent, please can I install this app?
& together (child + parent) with discussion, mutual agreement and collaboration:
- PPP/playstore install agreed app in PPP (then disable in PPP)
- PPP/manage-users/CP/enable app install for 'first party sources'
- PPP/manage-users/CP/install available apps - select new app for install in CP
- PPP/manage-users/CP/disable app installs
- CP, now open child profile CP and child can use app inside their profile CP
As an aside, my nephew has made friends with the only boy in school who doesn't have a smart phone. The two of them spend their breaks together and I'm told everyone else sits there just playing games on phones in their own little world ...