Some phones have software available to run two separated/isolated instances of the same app on a device. This may be called Dual Messenger on Samsung devices, or Parallel Apps on OnePlus devices.
Through adb
we can add apps which aren’t allowed by default. No root required.
Add non-default app
First we need the user id of the Android user assigned to the secondary apps. Connect your phone, enable USB Debugging in Developer Options, and run the following. You do need adb of course.
adb shell pm list users
This will return something like the following on a OnePlus device.
Users:
UserInfo{0:Your Name:13} running
UserInfo{999:Parallel Apps:4000030} running
We need the number 999
or whatever you find in that location for your phone.
Now we need the .apk
of the app you want. For example, you can find the .apk
for Signal here.
Go to the directory of that .apk
file, and run the following after replacing
999
with the id found before, and the filename of your apk.
adb install --user 999 desired_app.apk
If you get an error such as
INSTALL_FAILED_VERSION_DOWNGRADE
you need to add-r -d
to theadb
command to ignore this error.