How to find out if there is a second space on the Xiaomi Redmi phone

Xiaomi and Redmi smartphone owners often face the need to separate personal and work information, but they don’t always remember whether they have Second Space activated, a feature built into the MIUI and HyperOS shell that creates a completely isolated environment with their apps, photos and accounts, and understanding whether this feature is enabled is critical to freeing up memory or ensuring data security.

Sometimes users forget the password from an additional profile or simply get lost in the confusing settings menu, trying to find traces of its existence. In this article, we will discuss in detail all the ways that allow you to determine with absolute accuracy whether your device is running hidden space, and what to do with the information received.

Direct check through system settings

The most obvious and quick way to know the status of a function is to go to the regular configuration menu of the system. You need to open the Settings app and find a section that can be called Second Space or Second Space in different versions of the firmware. If this item is present in the list and you see the switch in the "On" position when you go to it, then the profile is active.

But MIUI often hides this option deep inside the menu, and try searching by settings: type "Second Space" or "Second Space" into the search bar, and if the system finds the corresponding partition, it will confirm the functionality at the software level, even if you're not using it.

Importantly, new versions of HyperOS may have changed their logic, and a menu item may be hidden if the feature has not been activated before, in which case the search may not yield results, indirectly indicating that no customized profiles are available.

• 🔍 Open Settings and search for the word "space".
• 📱 Check for the switch in the Additional Functions section.
• 🔄 Restart the device if the settings menu is not displayed correctly.

⚠️ Warning: If you logged into the menu and you see the Create button, the second space is not active at the moment. If you see the Remove or Switch button, the profile exists.

Analysis of the desktop and application panel

Visual signs are the first indicator that catches your eye. The second space in Xiaomi often has a separate set of widgets or shortcuts that can be duplicated on the home screen. Swipe your finger across your desktop to the left or right: if you see the ability to switch between two sets of screens through a swipe or special menu, this is a sure sign of the feature's activity.

Also, look at the control panel. In some MIUI configurations, there is a quick switch to change profiles, which can be put into the notification curtain. If you find an icon that resembles two intersecting circles or a human silhouette, and it is active, you are in one of the profiles.

Another sign is the presence of a system application Security with unusual behavior. Inside this application, the Cleanup or Acceleration section sometimes displays the total amount of memory occupied, which includes hidden profile data, which can confuse the user who is not aware of its existence.

• 👀 Look for the profile switch icon on the desktop or in the Tools folder".
• 📲 Check for duplicate system applications (calendar, contacts).
• 🔔 Check the notification curtain for hidden switches.

Checking through Task Manager and running processes

A more technical method is to analyze running processes. The second space is essentially a separate user account on Android running parallel to the main one. If you go to the Settings menu → About phone → Version of the kernel (or similar path to login to developer mode) and open up memory usage statistics, you can see unusual activity.

In Task Manager, if you have access to an extended view through ADB or special utilities, second-space processes are often marked with a prefix user_ For a typical user, it is a sign that some applications continue to work in the background and consume resources, even if you “closed” them in your current profile.

Also worth checking is the Applications → All Apps section. If you see apps that you didn’t exactly install in your current profile, but they show up in the list (sometimes marked “for another user”), this is a direct indication of the presence of a second space. Android sometimes allows you to see packages installed, even if they belong to another user.

Using the ADB team for accurate diagnosis

For users who aren’t afraid to use a computer, the most reliable way is to use USB debugging and the Android Debug Bridge (ADB) tool, which allows you to look under the hood of the operating system and see a list of all active user profiles, regardless of whether they are hidden in the interface or not.

To start, you need to activate the developer mode, quickly pressing 7 times on the build number in the About Phone menu, and turn on the Debugging over USB. After connecting to the PC, execute a command to output the list of users.

adb shell pm list users

The result of the command execution will show a list of active users. The standard main profile always has id=0. If there is a user with id=10 (or another number) and running status in the list, this means that the second space is active and takes up the resources of the device, deleting this user is possible only through the same console or special settings, if they are available.

⚠️ Be very careful when removing users through ADB. The pm remove-user command permanently erases all the data of the selected profile. user_id.

Analysis of the space occupied in the vault

An indirect but very telling sign of having a second space is the inexplicably large consumption of internal memory. Since the second profile has its own caches, downloads and application data, it can take anywhere from 2 to 10 GB or more, even if you haven’t downloaded anything there (system files weigh too).

Go to Settings → Memory and analyze the usage schedule. If the category "Other" or "System files" takes up an abnormally large amount of space, and you have not installed heavy games or shot videos in 4K, there is a high probability that the forgotten profile lives there. In some versions of MIUI, when you detail the memory, you can see the division by user, if the second space function is active.

If you delete a photo when you try to free up space, but the amount of memory does not decrease proportionally, it is possible that copies of these photos or other files are in an isolated storage of the second space, which is not cleaned by standard methods.

• 📉 Check the Memory section for the inflated category "Other".
• 🗑️ Compare the number of your files with the total amount of workload.
• 📂 Use the file manager to find hidden SecondSpace folders.

Table of comparison of signs of presence of profile

To organize the data, you can use a comparison table to quickly compare symptoms and make a final conclusion about the condition of your Xiaomi or Redmi smartphone.

As you can see from the table, the combination of programmatic and visual features gives the most accurate picture, and if two of the "Included" columns correspond to your situation, then the second profile is active.

Frequent Questions and Challenges (FAQ)