After setting up my first GOS-device for every day usage with several profiles and trying that for several weeks I just reached a point where I was wondering how the way I make use of separate profiles could be improved.
Of course I read around the forum and FAQ to get a basic understanding of the intended scenarios and tried to adapt several aspects into my setup:
The owner-profile is pretty much only used for administration purposes as it has most control over other profiles. Through this profile, I install and update apps through F-Droid and Aurora which I then make available/push into the designated profiles through user-management -> install apps. This way, all apps that are on any of the profiles are also present in the owner profile, albeit mostly uninitialized. No biometric unlock method is configured for this profile and no Google Play Services (GPS) installed.
One profile (A) with GPS installed is used for banking apps and cryptocurrency-related apps. Session ended when done, no biometric unlock method configured.
An additonal profile (B) with GPS installed is used for apps that (sadly) do not run without it and do not belong to profile A. Sometimes, this session needs to be kept open (e.g. navigation, public transport,...) and I might switch back and forth between this and others.
Another additional profile (C) is my main profile (no GPS) for daily use, it contains everything I commonly use (email, messenger, ...) except what has been laid out above.
So after running with this setup for some weeks, I found it somewhat complicated to switch between profiles as even the to latter ones at times need to be unlocked with their respective pin instead of a configured biometric unlock.
Having set individual rather complex pins for each profile make this a little challenging in certain situations. When this happens, apps that were allowed to run in the background of course are also restarted and might need an additional unlock-pin if configured like so.
Ending a session seems to always switch back to the owner profile. While it might make sense for some users, I'd prefer to set a different default profile that should be switched to. Of course I can switch from owner to my desired one even without unlocking the owner profile but doing it multiple times a day feels rather inefficient.
Yet I feel like I do not want to incorporate profile C into the owner profile, for example because I welcome the idea to restrict the visibility of other present/installed apps to those selected to be in that profile (would be all in owner).
So from a general point of view, is there something that might stick out to a more experienced GOS user that could be simplified/streamlined or might have been misunderstood by me?
And is the approach of installing all apps through the owner profile the recommended way of doing this also for my useage scenario?
Some benefits I definitely see are:
- profiles should be pretty isolated against silent-installs if the profile's install-app-permission is removed after pushing apps into it.
- updates from happen from a central profile-instance, not redundant within profiles.
Some aspects that so far remain unclear to me:
- if my profiles (A,B,C) are locked for app-installation after the initial setup, app-updates cannot be pushed into these profiles either and I first need to re-grant the permission? Those updates seem to fail silently (no error notification shown), right?
- if I miss to re-grant that permission to one of the profiles (say profile C), is there a way to manually push the update into that profile afterwards?
Finally, thanks to this wonderful community for offering this great OS and constructive support!