How to add any app to LG UX's Dual App feature

XDA

By Skanda Hazarika

Published Jun 14, 2020

XDA Junior Member zenith22 has found a way to add any app inside the Dual App space on LG phones running LG UX skin. Read on to know more!

The LG UX custom Android interface might not be the most popular OEM software out there, but it does pack in some useful features like a desktop mode in its latest iteration. LG also offers its feature to run separate instances of the same app, which is a concept we've come to know as app cloning. Dubbed as "Dual App", this particular feature can be found under Settings > General. By default, the Korean OEM allows only a handful of messaging platforms and social media apps to be cloned as dual apps, but one can easily bypass that allowlist.

As it turns out, LG's Dual App is largely similar to the "Parallel Apps" implementation in OxygenOS by OnePlus. In both cases, a hidden user profile is created in order to install a cloned instance of an app and keep the associated app data separate from the primary user profile. The profile ID of the secondary user profile, however, is different between LG UX and OxygenOS. While OnePlus is utilizing user "999" for Parallel Apps, LG UX spawns a new user profile with the ID “98” for this purpose. XDA Junior Member zenith22 has discovered this important detail by executing adb shell pm list users while tinkering with the Dual App section.

Now that we have the user profile ID, it's child's play to install any app of your choice inside LG's Dual App container. The required steps are as follows:

Set up ADB shell access. You might need to change the USB mode on your LG phone to "MIDI" to properly initialize USB debugging.
Download the APK file for the desired app to be cloned from a trusted source to your PC.

Run the following ADB command:

        adb install --user 98 <apk_name>.apk

This will install the app to user profile 98, i.e. the profile for Dual Apps.
To make things easier, you can try installing the Aurora Store to the hidden "Dual App" user profile. The Aurora Store is an unofficial client of the Google Play Store which will allow you to directly install apps inside the Dual App container.

How often do you use Dual App on your LG smartphone? Let us know in the comments below!