On OxygenOS 13 and earlier, the Parallel Apps space will clone WhatsApp and a handful of other apps and refuses everything else. The restriction is in the launcher, not in Android: the space is an ordinary secondary user profile, and adb can install anything into it.
Check one thing first, though. On OxygenOS 14.1 and later the feature — renamed App Cloner — gained an Other Apps list that clones almost anything already installed, with no ADB at all. Look there before you reach for a cable. Some apps still never appear in it, which is where the rest of this post comes in.
Parallel Apps is just user 999
Android supports multiple user profiles, and OxygenOS implements Parallel Apps as one of them — profile 999. Confirm it exists on your phone before you do anything else:
adb shell pm list users
Users:
UserInfo{0:Owner:c13} running
UserInfo{999:Parallel Apps:20000010} running
If there is no 999 in that list, Parallel Apps has not been enabled yet — turn it on for any one supported app in Settings → Apps → Parallel Apps, and the profile appears. The menu is called App Cloner from OxygenOS 12 onward and App Clone in OxygenOS 14, so look for those names on anything recent.
Install an app into the space
Set up ADB access on your computer, then:
adb install --user 999 <app_name>.apk
If the app is already on your main profile — you have WhatsApp and want a second one — you do not need its APK at all:
adb shell pm install-existing --user 999 com.whatsapp
That clones the copy already on the device into profile 999, and it is the version least likely to go wrong.
That is the whole trick. --user 999 targets the Parallel Apps profile instead of your main one, and the app shows up inside the space alongside the cloned WhatsApp.
Profile 999 ships with Google Play Services but no Play Store, so there is no way to install from inside the space until you put a store there yourself. That is the real reason to install one:
adb install --user 999 AuroraStore.apk
The Aurora Store is an open-source Play Store client — the F-Droid build is the reproducible one. Worth saying plainly: it is unofficial, and its anonymous-account mode is against Google's terms of service.
Check what is in there, and remove things
adb shell pm list packages --user 999
adb shell pm uninstall --user 999 com.example.app
(adb uninstall --user 999 works too, but the pm form is the portable one — adb help does not list the flag, which makes people think it is a typo.)
The uninstall only affects the clone. In Android's multi-user model there is one installed package; your main copy keeps its own data directory and UID under profile 0 and is untouched — which is the whole point, and also worth verifying on something you do not care about before you try it on WhatsApp.
What can go wrong
Failure [INSTALL_FAILED_USER_RESTRICTED] means the profile itself is barred from installing apps — the DISALLOW_INSTALL_APPS user restriction, not an unknown-sources prompt. You cannot switch to profile 999 to change it either, because OxygenOS hides it from the user switcher. In practice this points at a device policy or a vendor lock rather than something you can toggle.
The clone and the original both start crashing. Reported often enough with this trick to be worth knowing: the fix is to remove the Parallel Apps profile and recreate it.
The app installs but will not open. Some apps refuse to run in a secondary profile at all — banking apps in particular check for exactly this. There is no fix worth pursuing; use the main profile for those.
Parallel Apps is missing on your phone. OxygenOS has been ColorOS-based since version 12, and the feature was renamed there rather than removed — look for App Cloner or App Clone. OnePlus confirmed in July 2026 that OxygenOS is being retired altogether, with eligible devices moving to ColorOS 17 on Android 17, so expect the OPPO naming from here on. Run the pm list users check regardless: if there is no second profile, this method has nothing to target.
The version that works on any Android phone
Parallel Apps is a OnePlus feature. The same result — two copies of WhatsApp, or of anything else — is achievable on any modern Android phone using the Work profile instead, with no vendor feature involved and no root. That method is in installing Dual Apps on any Android device, and if you are not on a OnePlus, start there instead.
