Remove Shelter

Defense of Work Profiles

1. Work profiles can be scheduled, not private spaces yet.

2. GrapheneOS acknowledges work profile use-cases:

The remaining use case of a work profile for now is that you can’t have more than 1 Private Space so you can continue using a work profile as a 2nd poor man’s Private Space.

We look forward to simply being able to tell people not to use work profiles for personal use but we can’t yet because it’s useful having 2 nested profiles rather than 1.

1. GrapheneOS would prefer to replace work profiles and secondary user profiles with multiple private spaces, but (very importantly) they have not done so yet:

In the future, support for having multiple Private Spaces would largely replace 1 person using multiple secondary users.

1. Work profiles use the same framework [2] as private spaces and secondary profiles, just with customizable isolation, which is a feature for many, not an antifeature.

2. I am citing GrapheneOS frequently, but it is important to remember that GrapheneOS users represent a minority of our readers, and our Android recommendations are general purpose.

   • My personal belief is that we don’t say that Pixels are the only acceptable Android devices to use. I think they are the only devices you should buy , but that is a totally different question.

Until private spaces have a reasonable quantity limit I think we should not remove work profile tools. It is important to continue recommending Shelter unless a better alternative which achieves the same functionality (secondary user profiles do not) is found, because it serves a purpose many people demand, and Island and Insular are worse.

Defense of Shelter

Today I was looking and Shelter remains actively maintained. The development repo has already increased the target SDK version to 35, but they have not published a tagged release so the version of F-Droid is still 34 (Android 14).

I don’t think this is a mistake, however, as Android 14 remains maintained with security updates, it is up to the global current May 1 security patch level.

This meets Google Play’s current target SDK requirement.

I see no reason to update an app like this more than once a year if no security issues are discovered with it. It is feature-complete because all it does is basically enable a flag that is built in to AOSP, AOSP obviously maintains the actual work profile code.

In the absence of issues (security or otherwise) with the app code itself, I think the only obligation is to update yearly to bump the SDK level, which Shelter does.