Comment 1 for bug 1557716

indicator-session doesn’t have a phone profile because I never intended it to appear on a phone. It consists mostly of things that are irrelevant on a phone.
A. The overall UI is simpler than a PC, so “Help” is less useful.
B. The phone was a single-user device, so “Switch Account” and the account list were non sequiturs.
C. “Log Out” and “Suspend” are replaced by the app lifecycle: apps save state across user sessions and power sessions respectively.
D. “Lock” and “Shut Down” are mostly redundant because it is much easier to get to a phone’s equivalent hardware UI than a PC’s equivalent hardware UI.
E. “Restart” is replaced by not having any functions that require restart but don’t prompt for it.

That left only “About”, which was demoted to System Settings, and “System Settings”, which was put in the Launcher by default.

Since then, the main thing that’s changed has been (B), the plan to introduce multiple user accounts. Realistically, though, ~99% of devices will remain single-user, so it would be inappropriate to introduce an indicator just for that. “Switch Account…” could easily be a button in a unified session dialog instead.

If Ubuntu Touch ever becomes sophisticated enough to do the tasks that people use Ubuntu on PCs for, then (A) will have changed, but even that would be a weak reason to introduce an indicator menu.