Do you use Shelter or similar app to add profiles? If yes they are work profiles... To the contrast, normal user profiles are created from Settings ... Add user button.

nothing fancy, no app: just the usual way of creating user profiles from settings.
I am creating these user profiles from the owner profile, obviously, and in this profile I have no app installed

    h2dden Then they are user profiles, not work profiles so we get that figured out.

    What phone do you use? Do you have lots of apps running? Do you think it's possible that it runs out of memory and evicts other profile?

      I have a Pixel 6.
      I am not running many apps. I have found this behaviour: ending other secondary profiles automatically when bringing up profiles with google play services and also with profiles without google play services and a small number of apps.
      Not sure how much memory these user profiles need, but it seems to be more related to this magic number 3 profiles, rather than the number of apps in the active profiles

      it is a bit of a puzzle and I would be curious whether other Pixel 6 users face a similar experience

      I was able to reproduce this behavior! Running 3 user profiles (Owner + 2 secondary user profiles) is fine... As soon as you open the 4th user profile, the other 2 secondary user profiles are locked (required passphrase just like after restart). I don't have Sandboxed play services on any profile so this issue is not related to Play Services...

      My guess it's an AOSP thing... Not sure if this can be fixed easily in GOS or not, devs would know more...

      The 3 profile limit is a current AOSP hard limit and is actually expected and normal behaviour.

      While GOS has enabled the creation of more profiles than stock it hasn't changed the limit of concurrent profiles.

      As 3rd Gen have finally been discontinued and no longer receive support and 6GB RAM has become the lowest standard across supported device, after the Android 13 transition, use of more can be researched by the team.

      Is it a good idea to open PRs in GOS documentation repo for things like this? Or it will cause more time suck for developers rather than help?

      • Hat likes this.
      2 years later

      Is there a plan to increase the number of active secondary profiles?
      3, actually owner +2, is a usability issue to me especially with the dissapearing widgets
      I find myself quite often navigating from a secondary profile to another which kills my secondary profile daily driver and cuases the widets to dissapear. Every time I have to add the back... a nuissance
      Can this limit be raised to 4? Owner +3?

      2 months later

      Don't know. When this happened (perhaps changelogs could be consulted) but I just found out to my surprise that previous profiles remain open/active if you freshly log into a new one even if that takes the count above 2 (+ 1 main profile). Previously you could only have 2+1 active. Right now I tested and have 4+1 open and all are active!

      Not sure if AOSP increased the limit or the Graphene folks. Either way, wanted to post here as an update on the issue and thank to whoever did this - so thank you :). Constantly entering long password manager passwords because the profile was shutdown was a PITA. Hopefully no longer the case!