Quote:
Originally Posted by turtle
I meant to get back to this post sooner. I'm not shocked about the single account. It's really iOS and those are all one user OSs. Even though I would love for my kids to be able to switch accounts and have one device, Apple would rather I have multiple devices.
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That may be true as far as the business is concerned, but I think it's a bit more nuanced:
- the origins of iOS are on iPhone, where a single-user limitation kind of makes sense (yes, there are exceptions even to that, but I find this limitation largely reasonable)
- the same is true on Apple Watch
- on iPad, it's a lot less true. And they've already broken that rule for education anyway.
- it doesn't really make any sense for me on HomePod. You can't really argue "just buy another one", as households don't generally have one living room per person. The device is clearly largely designed to be used by multiple people.
The challenges also differ: on the iPad, surely we're envisioning a Mac-like experience where the lockscreen doubles as a user account switcher. Done. This does complicate some things, like whether installed apps are shared among users (probably easiest to answer that with a resounding no), and to which extent some settings apply to multiple users and others don't, but this seems… somewhat solvable.
It's far more complicated on HomePod — you don't really authenticate with HomePod. Siri would suddenly need to either recognize multiple distinct voices as different users, and/or accept some form of authentication.
My understanding is that Alexa and Google Home just ignore the latter part and only recognize different voices. That doesn't seem like a great solution?
Quote:
Originally Posted by turtle
Really though, for phones and tablets the coding would have to change so much for multi-user support. Not that it isn't doable, I just don't envision it any time soon.
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I think I wouldn't quite be that pessimistic.
I'm not sure why they made such weird limitations (why does iOS have a /User directory, and hardcoded passwords, to boot? seems like a needless lack of foresight), but ultimately, they're all related to macOS, which handles multiple users just fine.
In fact, given that the two have sort of evolved in parallel and macOS has inherited some iOS capabilities but in its own fashion (for example, App Sandbox works per-user using the ~/Library/Containers structure), the plan all along may have been to wait for multi-user capabilities to mature enough before they get merged back to iOS.
To summarize, ironically, HomePod is both the platform where I find multi-user support the hardest to solve and also the one where I find it the most essential. A single-user device in a household living room is just… dumb.