“Apple has signaled that it is aware of a desire to support multiple users on one iPad, and that the issue is ‘currently being investigated’ by the company’s engineering team,” Neil Hughes reports for AppleInsider.
“The developer reached out to AppleInsider after they received a reply from Apple after submitting a bug report,” Hughes reports. “Apple’s Bug Reporter includes an option to specify that a submission isn’t a bug report, but rather a suggestion.”
Hughes reports, “In the suggestion submitted to Apple, the developer simply requested that the company add support for multiple users to the iPad. ‘After further investigation it has been determined that this is a known issue, which is currently being investigated by engineering,’ the official response from Apple Developer Connection’s Worldwide Developer Relations team reads.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Standard form response. Apple could be doing anything from dispatching a high-level team to work on it overnight to filing it in the circular file and you’d get back the same response.
That said, it would be relatively trivial to bring at least Fast User Switching over to iOS from OS X. That Apple hasn’t done so long ago suggests to us that they’d rather sell an iPad to every family member than a single iPad per family.
If we’re right about why iOS still doesn’t have multi-user support, then Apple’s wrong.
Not only are they failing to “delight customers,” but they are failing to realize that it won’t impinge iPad sales, but enhance them. Enabling multi-user support, makes the iPad even more attractive to families and, once families get their first iPad, they quickly realize that they need more than one. One iPad, even between only two people, just isn’t enough.
Enabling multi-user support will actually end up selling more iPads. So, get on the ball, Apple. Enable multi-user support in iOS already!
(If it’s a storage space issue, make the feature available as “dual-user” on 32 GB iPads and “up to four users” on 64GB models. That’d give more incentive to buy more spacious and higher priced models and, since Apple already sells a 16GB model, they tacitly endorse 16GB as the base requirement for an iPad user.)
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Fred Mertz” for the heads up.]