Chrome doesn’t let me switch Google accounts on my phone, but this trick overrides it

Almost every Google app on my Android phone offers an easy way to switch accounts. I either swipe up/down across my profile pic on the top right or tap it to pick another account. This makes it easy for me to jump between my personal, Workspace, and shared-with-my-husband accounts in apps like Gmail, Drive, Maps, Keep, Contacts, Photos, the Play Store, and more. Even YouTube has a relatively decent way to flip between multiple Google accounts.

Chrome, though? Oh, no, no, no, no. Sorry, you can’t switch accounts on your phone. You have to completely sign out of an account, log in with another, sync everything, and then repeat that same useless process every time.

It’s infuriating, especially if, like me, you keep your browsing history, bookmarks, logins, and payment methods separate between your different Google accounts. I don’t want all of my work browsing history to mix with my personal interests and ruin my Google Discover feed. Nor do I want my shared bookmarks with my husband to appear in my personal browser. Chrome has solved this on desktops with multiple profiles. I can have three windows open — one for each account — and switch between them as fast as my fingers can tap CMD+` (or Alt+Tab on Windows).

There’s a workaround on mobile, though, but it’s not the most straightforward: Just use multiple Chrome releases.

After years of struggling with Chrome’s multiple-account limitation, I realized that I could instead use multiple Chromes to sign each one into a different account. That epiphany came to me many years ago, and I’ve been using this trick since then. Here’s how I set it up.

On the stable release of Chrome, I sign in with my personal Gmail account. This holds everything personal to me — my browsing habits and bookmarks, my logins, and my payment details. I use this as my default browser so that whatever random searches I do or articles I read only influence my Discover feed on this personal account and don’t ruin my work or shared accounts.

I also install Chrome Beta on all of my Android phones and tablets. I log into the account I share with my husband here because it’s my second most-used account on the go. This is where my husband and I have our shared logins for the electricity and water company, our most visited grocery stores, various reservation and cultural websites, hotel bookings, car rentals, etc. This is where our joint payment cards live and what we use to search for everything from a new carpet to random Ikea items.

Since I use this account very frequently on my phone, I’ve chosen to keep it on Chrome Beta because it’s the second most stable version of the browser — after the basic stable Chrome release, of course!

And finally, I install Chrome Dev as well and log into my Android Authority Google Workspace account with it. Dev is a more cutting-edge version of Chrome, which is more likely to have bugs on top of the testing features that aren’t ready for a full rollout to everyone. But since I rarely need to do work browsing things on my phone (that gets a lot more mileage on my desktop), I’m fine keeping it relegated to Chrome Dev.

On average, I only have to use Chrome Dev once or twice a week, usually on the weekend to tweak something in our WordPress backend, fix an article typo, or change a scheduling time instead of waiting until I’m back at my desk on Monday. If I need to urgently access some of our other company-wide services for which I haven’t installed the full app on my phone, Chrome Dev is also where I do it.

And if I ever feel the need to run a fourth account for some reason, there’s always Chrome Canary as a last-ditch option, though it’s the most unstable release, and I wouldn’t use it for an account I’d need to access often.

Overall, this system works near-flawlessly for me and allows me to keep a neat separation of church and state… and marriage, I suppose. Every browser has a dedicated use case, every account is separate, and after running this system for many years, I have almost never made an unfortunate overlap between all of my Chrome profiles. There’s the issue of links, though.

The one hiccup that my system faces is when I run across a link in another app. Say I get an email from my favorite grocery store about a hot exotic fruits deal, and I just want to grab those mangoes and pineapples before they disappear. I click on the link in Gmail, it opens in regular Chrome (which is my default browser), and I can’t make that purchase in time because that’s not where my household supermarket login details are. Now, the mangoes are sold out, and I have to spend my February eating boring apples and oranges.

There are two workarounds for this. One is to avoid clicking on the link and instead tap and hold to copy it. Then, I manually open Chrome Beta, tap to open the page from my copied link, and lo and behold, I can snatch those pineapples in time, thanks to my logged-in joint grocery account!

The other workaround requires not setting up a default browser ever or using an app that catches links before it redirects them to other browsers. I get a pop-up question each time I click any link to ask me where I’d like to open it. That way, I can send some links to Chrome stable, others to Beta, and others to the Dev browser. This solution is more time-consuming every day, and it kind of stops my flow when I’m tapping and using my phone. Given that I don’t often need to open links from my other accounts, I’ve skipped this solution and I just use the copy/paste trick instead. Your mileage may vary.

It feels silly to think that this has been an issue in Chrome on Android since, well, the browser’s original release. Why other Google apps allow you to easily hop between accounts while Chrome refuses is a mystery to me. Why do we need to log out and in to resync browsing history, bookmarks, and other preferences between accounts? That’s ridiculous.

The solution should’ve been obvious a decade ago: Google should just port the multiple profile support from Chrome for desktop and add the account switcher that mobile apps like Gmail or Google Drive have!

I’m curious to know if any of you run multiple Google accounts and whether you’ve really separated their browsing data like I have. Have you adopted multiple Chrome releases to circumvent the lack of account switching on mobile? Or do you have any other solution for that?