> One thing that is painfully missing from iOS is multiuser support.
It is unbelievable that, so many years later, I can't hand my iPhone or iPad to a friend, co-worker, my kids or someone at a meeting and have them be in "guest" mode or some mode where I can exercise complete access control to information and apps. Today, if you hand your unlocked iOS device to someone they have full access to anything that isn't locked out specifically by an app. And, even at that, your entire device is exposed.
I've been looking forward to a multi-user iOS ever since the first iPad came out. I consider iPhones as more personal, where each person (or young adult/adult) in a house/family would likely have one of their own. But iPad is a different story altogether, and is more likely to be shared among people in a house/family. It's frustrating that it's still not possible to create user accounts and quickly switch between them on iOS devices.
A few months ago I watched one of the WWDC videos about a feature called "Shared iPad" [1] that allows schools to provide shared iPads to students and what developers would have to do to support it (and what comes out of the box and avoids work for developers too). Each student has their preferences and work saved on device and on iCloud and the switching process would download the appropriate bits for the next student who logs in (if/when necessary). My understanding of this, and the reason why user switching is still not around, is that this needs more flash memory in the device (to cache things and avoid going to iCloud as much as possible), a good amount of RAM on the device to support reasonably good performance for user switching (so all apps don't necessarily have to be killed or off loaded from RAM when possible), and certain other considerations that others may know better about.
But I'm still waiting for this feature to be open to everyone so we can have "Shared iPad" at home or at work.
I've been looking forward to a multi-user iOS ever since the first iPad came out. I consider iPhones as more personal, where each person (or young adult/adult) in a house/family would likely have one of their own. But iPad is a different story altogether, and is more likely to be shared among people in a house/family. It's frustrating that it's still not possible to create user accounts and quickly switch between them on iOS devices.
A few months ago I watched one of the WWDC videos about a feature called "Shared iPad" [1] that allows schools to provide shared iPads to students and what developers would have to do to support it (and what comes out of the box and avoids work for developers too). Each student has their preferences and work saved on device and on iCloud and the switching process would download the appropriate bits for the next student who logs in (if/when necessary). My understanding of this, and the reason why user switching is still not around, is that this needs more flash memory in the device (to cache things and avoid going to iCloud as much as possible), a good amount of RAM on the device to support reasonably good performance for user switching (so all apps don't necessarily have to be killed or off loaded from RAM when possible), and certain other considerations that others may know better about.
But I'm still waiting for this feature to be open to everyone so we can have "Shared iPad" at home or at work.
[1]: https://developer.apple.com/videos/play/wwdc2016/303/