“Earth to Apple: A lot of families share a single iPad,” Susie Ochs writes for Macworld. “But the cool new Screen Time feature only works as intended if everyone has his or her own device.”
“Without user accounts in iOS, the activity reports and time-limiting features in Screen Time just won’t work as intended if multiple people in a household share any one device,” Ochs writes. “The Mac has user accounts and fast-account switching, but iOS does not.”
“Amazon’s FreeTime Unlimited service lets parents give different permissions to each kid, and track the activities of each individual separately, but I’m not holding my breath for Apple to follow suit,” Ochs writes. “After all, the company has absolutely no incentive to fix a problem whose natural solution is, ‘Buy more Apple devices.'”
I have a guest account on my Mac as well as one for a grandchild. I’m not able to do that with my iPad, and I’m not going to buy another just for a few days a month.
Stuff like this makes me worry about Apple marketing screwing over its customers. This is such a DUH issue. Why hasn’t Apple setup user accounts on iOS devices?
One can of course setup parental controls on iOS devices. But mummy and duddy aren’t going to be pleased having to disable them every time they want to use the family iPad.
I applaud Apple’s attempt at sharing devices. In a school setting though I’m not sure the ‘sharing’ as described on the page works in the way educators may want. It appears that Apple’s version does allow setting up multiple accounts on individual devices. However, it also states that data is stored locally for each account. The good side is that data remains protected. The bad side is should that one device break, all students’ work is also inaccessible since the data does not exist outside the device.
This implementation of ‘sharing’ may be a hard sell for education when compared to Chromebooks that periodically backs up all data to the cloud automatically resulting in little to no lost work and quick restoration of work should any single device be incapacitated.
I have a guest account on my Mac as well as one for a grandchild. I’m not able to do that with my iPad, and I’m not going to buy another just for a few days a month.
Stuff like this makes me worry about Apple marketing screwing over its customers. This is such a DUH issue. Why hasn’t Apple setup user accounts on iOS devices?
One can of course setup parental controls on iOS devices. But mummy and duddy aren’t going to be pleased having to disable them every time they want to use the family iPad.
Ok.. lets see.
Do i want personal accounts on ios …………..YES Very much so.
Do i want my Apple stock to go up and up .. YES Very Very much so
So ill take the compromise.
Multiple accounts would make the iPad much easier to manage in small school settings.
Take a look at this…
Scroll down to ipad section..
Shared ipads in Apple School Manager
https://www.apple.com/education/it/
I applaud Apple’s attempt at sharing devices. In a school setting though I’m not sure the ‘sharing’ as described on the page works in the way educators may want. It appears that Apple’s version does allow setting up multiple accounts on individual devices. However, it also states that data is stored locally for each account. The good side is that data remains protected. The bad side is should that one device break, all students’ work is also inaccessible since the data does not exist outside the device.
This implementation of ‘sharing’ may be a hard sell for education when compared to Chromebooks that periodically backs up all data to the cloud automatically resulting in little to no lost work and quick restoration of work should any single device be incapacitated.
Not rich, but everyone in our family has their own iPad.
The kids have hand me down older versions as the parents get newer versions.
We use family sharing and no one has to wait for the other to be done with it to do what they need/want to.