A new commit in the Chrome OS code review may give the first indicator of what will be replacing the now defunct Supervised Account feature of the platform. The commit points to a new Chrome OS Account Manager. The details are pretty thin on it and the comments are still private so there is very little to go on to be fair.
However, this is the first commit to point to anything remotely resembling Supervised Accounts. That feature, most often used for child accounts on Chromebooks, was deprecated earlier this year. Google at the time indicated a new solution would be coming forward but didn’t give a timeline. It may be coming sooner rather than later.
The commit suggest that a that login tokens would be moved from disk to memory on login and that the login interface would be change to support it. That suggests that we will see a login screen that allow for child accounts. Further, given the continuing merging of the look-and-feel of Android and Chrome OS, it could be very similar in look to that of Android.
There is no indication that this is even in the Canary channel at this point so we are probably looking at a late summer or fall release of this feature. But for those who were caught out by the Supervised Account feature going away, this is certainly welcome news as a replacement appears to be in the works.
