Remember this post about a Google exec talking about making Google products more “kid-friendly”? I have something similar to that here. A bug report indicating that Google is working on adding Chrome’s “Supervised User” feature to its Android version too.

This code commit says: “Add support for child accounts on Android”.

Now, they are calling it “child accounts” even though there are mentions of “Supervised Users” in the code. I am hoping that it is intentional. Are they building something kid-friendly building on top of the existing Supervised User architecture?

Maybe. I don’t have a lot of information to share on this other than bits and pieces of code comments. Like this one:

An account feature (corresponding to a Gaia service flag) that specifies whether the account
+ * is a child account.

So, What is a Supervised User?

Official literature:

When you add a supervised user to your account in Chrome, you can control and view the websites that your user visits. Supervised users don’t need a Google Account or an email address because the manager creates a profile for the supervised user through their Google Account.

This is primarily for parents to provide a supervised browsing session for kids, with some control over their usage. Recently, there was a mention of a new kind of user account that might be more “enterprise-friendly”. So, are they taking Supervised Users into two directions made specifically for kids and enterprises?

We will have to wait. Stay tuned for updates!

Big thanks to Craig Tumblison for the help with this one!