A teardown of Google’s latest Project Fi .apk reveals that we may see group sharing coming to the network in the near future. The teardown revealed specific bits of code that all but confirm the presence of several new features that would enable group management. The highlight of what we saw is the “Administrator” abilities, which allows someone to have very specific control over connected accounts.
A perfect example of where this would be used is in your typical family. It may be hard to control what your kids are up to and how much data they consume in some cases. With administrator abilities, one can have almost complete control over connected devices and manage data usage, shut down the connection to a user, and even disconnect the connection at certain scheduled periods.
In fact, here’s the piece of code that reveals the administrator status:
<string name="owner">Owner</string> < string name="owner_details">Can adjust everything</string> < string name="paid_by_x">Paid by %1$s</string>
And here is some that further elaborates on the abilities of an administrator:
<string name="overage_title">Data budget alert</string> < string name="overage_details">%1$s has used %2$s more than budgeted.</string> < string name="self_overage_details">You've used %1$s more than budgeted.</string>
Group members can be added and removed by a manager, although we aren’t quite sure on how many members a single group may have. Specifics like this, and a few other grey areas are likely to only be revealed once Project Fi group sharing gets officially announced.
