Create separate profiles for work and home or for two-person game stats.
If you’re sick and tired of sharing Angry Birds high scores with your significant other, or perhaps you want to have distinct profiles for, say, your personal and professional Evernote or Dropbox accounts, then you may be relieved to know that, with only a little tinkery, you can create multiple profiles for almost any Android app.
I say ‘almost any’ because you can’t do it for system apps like text messaging, contacts or launchers, nor any apps that use background services or syncing (those that appear in the ‘Accounts and Sync’ menu in ‘Settings’). It’s also not advisable for apps that sync to an external server without requiring an in-app account login.
Titanium Backup Pro: worth its weight in gold.
So what do we need to do to achieve this magic multi-user mojo? First of all – like with all the best Android tricks – you need a rooted handset. If you haven’t rooted your handset, you’re just not living la vida Androida (this is a bad thing).
Next up, you need the ever-marvellous, staple of the Android power-user’s diet, Titanium Backup Pro ($6.49 on the Market, and worth every penny). As a quick aside, Titanium Backup Pro (henceforth known as TBP) also allows you to remove (or just ‘freeze’/disable) carrier bloatware, schedule regular app backups, migrate apps and (some) system data between ROMS while maintaining Market links, upload your backups to Dropbox, and more. In short, you’re doing yourself a disservice if you have a rooted handset and don’t own it.
Once you have both these things, it’s simply a matter of opening up TBP, and – after running your first backup – click on the ‘Switch Profile’ button on the front page, and then ‘Create a new data profile’. Do this again to create another profile for your significant other/gaming nemesis/professional life.
Now, click on the ‘Switch Profile’ button, and select the profile that you want to use as your standard profile. This profile will contain the data or high scores as they appear on your phone right now.
Now, in the ‘Backup/Restore’ tab of TBP, find any apps that you want to make multi-profile aware, and hold/long-click them, and click on ‘Enable “multiple profiles” for this app’. Your current data will now be associated with the profile you just activated.
The only thing left to do now is set up a widget on your homescreen to create one-touch profile switching. Simply hold/long-click the homescreen you want the widget to appear on, select ‘Widgets’ and then ‘Titanium Backup (Data Profiles)’. So, the next time you need to activate that other high score, just click on the widget to bring up a list of profiles to choose from. When you select a profile for the first time, any multi-profile activated apps will start just as if they’d been freshly installed.
To disable multiple profiles for an app, simply activate the profile containing the data you want to keep, long-hold the app of concern in the Backup/Restore list, and select ‘Disable “multiple profiles” for this app’. Note that all data associated with other profiles will be deleted for that app.
