Dear all
new GrapheneOS user here and I'm loving it so far.
As per many of you (I suppose), I did approach to a different way to use Android with GrapheneOS using multi-users to keep important things separated.
The idea was to have any notification from any user, regardless on which user I'm currently login.
What I found is that, aside from the "owner" user (which is always working), all the other users tend to go in a "sleep" mode and they won't send me any notification if I've not been logged in for a while (says 2 hours). This is not happening if I've been logged in the user recently.
For instance, I have my "banking user" on which I only have banking apps. I don't access on that every single day, however I still need to have delivered any notification from the banking apps instantly, regardless of the user I'm currently on.
Can this behaviour be avoided? Many thanks

seth changed the title to multi users notifications issues .

Whilst GrapheneOS increases the number of user profiles that can be created to 32, there is an important limitation, and is one that you're coming up against now.

The owner profile always runs AFU, but no more than two other user profiles can be running at any one time.

So if you open a third secondary user profile, one of the other two secondary profiles running in the background will close. I don't know how the system decides which one to close.

I'm not a developer so I'm not sure the exact reason for this limitation in AOSP; however, from what I understand it's not something that the GrapheneOS developers can change. I would imagine its limited by the memory of the device.

This topic has been discussed in previous threads on this discussion forum, let me see if I can dig one out.

    @treequell thank you very much for your quick response. I finally got the reason why I didn't get the notifications. I had the "owner" user, plus 3 more. I'm trying now with "owner" plus 2 only.
    Do you know if there is any limitation set depending on the device as well (the older it is, the worse it is perhaps)? Mine is a Pixel 5 which I suppose it has less RAM compare to a Pixel 6 or 7, therefore perhaps more limited.

      You're welcome.

      seth Do you know if there is any limitation set depending on the device as well (the older, the worse perhaps)?

      As far as I know the limitation is currently the same for all supported devices.

      Please have a look at this feature request in the issue tracker on GitHub: https://github.com/GrapheneOS/os-issue-tracker/issues/2165

      Any such implementation, if possible, would likely be of interest for users like yourself regularly using multiple user profiles.

        treequell

        So if you only have two profiles (main + secondary) then you should get instant notifications from the second profile without it ever going to sleep?

        Follow-up question: after a restart, do you first need to manually log in to the second profile or will you automatically get the notifications from there?

            DeletedUser28 Hi! I'm testing the setting owner+2 extra profiles right now. I'll keep this post updated as soon as I have some results.

            DeletedUser28 Follow-up question: after a restart, do you first need to manually log in to the second profile or will you automatically get the notifications from there?

            After a restart, as long as you've enabled to "send notification to current user" inside all your profiles, you should be able to received the notifications straight away, without the need to log on the others account again. Again, I'll keep you posted on that as well.

                  DeletedUser28 So if you only have two profiles (main + secondary) then you should get instant notifications from the second profile without it ever going to sleep?

                  In theory, yes. At least until you log out (end session) of one of those user profiles, or until your restart your phone. Whether this holds in practice, I have never tested user profiles sufficiently to say for sure.

                    seth After a restart, as long as you've enabled to "send notification to current user" inside all your profiles, you should be able to received the notifications straight away, without the need to log on the others account again. Again, I'll keep you posted on that as well.

                    That won't work after a device restart. After a device restart all user profiles are encrypted at rest, and will only run in the background after unlocking them one-by-one.

                        DeletedUser28 Work profiles aren't separate profiles in the same way as user profiles. Work profiles are managed by the work profile admin; for example, Shelter. The work profile is always in the owner profile which is always logged in AFU (after first unlock). How the work profile behaves is governed by the work profile app and how you choose to set it up.

                          13 days later

                          here I am updating my experience:
                          1) Having multi accounts with working notifications on all of them really depends on your devices' RAM. It looks like the system kills the ones unused with more active apps first and put the accounts themselves on sleep, therefore notifications stops and will ask for PIN again when you try to log back in.
                          2) Done few tests, and in my specific use case with Pixel 5, I ended up using only Owner + 1 only extra account. That's the best I can get if I want notifications always on for both accounts. Bear in mind, a newer Pixel may handle more accounts with notifications on at the same time.
                          3) If you shutdown or reboot your device, yes, you need to log back in any accounts using your PIN to have the notifications working again.
                          That's it for now! Hope that helps.