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How does Apple restrict you to a single Apple ID?

I use my personal Apple ID for personal things, my work one for work things, and as an admin of our Apple Business Manager account I can create new Apple IDs for anyone in the company as necessary.

To my knowledge Apple doesn't even have a policy of requiring one account, I've certainly been told to set up separate accounts by Apple support teams.

Facebook does have this problem, they have a policy that you must not have separate IDs, they police this heavily with a lot of automated bans, and they also require a Facebook account to do development with Facebook.

It’s more like a single device is limited to a single Apple ID. (At least the mobile ones.) that gets tricky when it comes to, e.g. sharing an iPad with your kids. On computers you can work around it by having different profiles different people use.

Do you use multiple Apple IDs on one device? I tried doing that for some time, and it caused a lot of issues. Maybe it works if you have separate devices for work and for home use, but I use my Macs for both business and home use.

I do! I have a separate Apple ID for services like iMessage than I do for the App Store. I can't log into more Apple IDs than that in settings though.

Or see people who "spammed" emotes into a Youtube livestream getting caught by spam detection and locked out of gmail.

And, IIRC, they only did it because the YouTube streamer (i.e. the channel host) asked them to do it!

> I need to log in with my personal credentials to download software from the Mac App store.

Do you though? Why not just setup a "apps@<yourbiz>.com" and create a new account?

> and now her personal iMessages and emails are on it. It's stupid.

So just turn these services off? They aren't mandatory.

Registering AppleID involves phone number checking. In some countries getting one without exposing personal information is not trivial.

Lots of services won’t allow duplicates. For example, you can’t use the same number for account recovery on two different Microsoft accounts. Zoho won’t let you register more than one account with the same number. Etc..

I silo my profiles. I have 4 of them. It’s really hard to do. Everyone encourages you to put all your stuff into a single profile. It’s awful for work life balance and security, but it benefits big tech companies, so that’s why it’s like that.

Do you want separate profiles for your password manager? Pay twice. Do you want separate personal and work windows installs (dual boot)? Pay twice. Etc..

Free, reputable password managers are available if you want to separate two different databases. As for work and personal Windows, it's likely that your company covers the licensing cost of their copy.

> My girlfriend bought an iPad for the kids to watch TV. It's shared by a couple of people. She had to log in with her Apple ID to set it up, and now her personal iMessages and emails are on it. It's stupid.

Apple considers iPads (and iPhones/Macs) as personal devices. You aren't expected to share an iPad, you're expected to buy an iPad for each user.

> Apple considers iPads (and iPhones/Macs) as personal devices. You aren't expected to share an iPad, you're expected to buy an iPad for each user.

Categorically not true. iPads in particular can be set up for multi-user with hand off.

Shared iPad Overview: https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/mdm/cad7e2e0cf56/web

Shared iPad for Education: https://developer.apple.com/education/shared-ipad/

Shared iPad for Business (MSFT Intune MDM docs): https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/mem/intune/enrollment/devic...

> Shared iPad requires a mobile device management (MDM) solution and Managed Apple IDs that are issued and owned by the organisation. Shared iPad requires a mobile device management (MDM) solution and Managed Apple IDs that are issued and owned by the organisation. Users with a Managed Apple ID can then sign in to Shared iPad, which is owned by the organisation. Note: Managed Apple IDs don’t support Family Sharing.

Practically not false.

That doesn’t work for a personal account.

Then Apple is either wrong, or being actively malicious with its products in order to sell more of them.

I mean it’s not really malicious to design a single-user system. At best it’s passively malicious. Sure, you can always share your personal pizza but you have to deal with the consequences that it was sized for one person and you both might be hungry after.

Are you upset about the fact that you can’t have multiple isolated user-accounts on an iPhone?

> Are you upset about the fact that you can’t have multiple isolated user-accounts on an iPhone?

The iPhone was mentioned once, to connect it’s not possible on either iPhone or iPad. This is about the iPad, a completely different class of device, where it makes sense it would be shared, at least within a family, and has nothing to do with personal pizzas.

It'a small point here, but the way you moved the goal post so your analogy applied more really bothered me.

“I want device to be shareable” is very different than “Apple is malicious for not making device shareable.”

I’m not trying to move the goalposts because I think of my iPad as just a larger iPhone. To me they’re the same.

It’s such an odd dynamic because I see so many families sharing an iPad which isn’t multi-user but then treating laptops as personal.

> This is about the iPad, a completely different class of device, where it makes sense it would be shared, at least within a family, and has nothing to do with personal pizzas.

It would be very awkward, even if you had multiple user accounts. How do you deal with things like notifications on the lock screen for messages, which can be very personal. There is so much personal stuff on my iPad, it would be like sharing a toothbrush. Sure, you could do it, but why would you ever want to ?

Computers have become deeply personal devices, to the point that having to keep personal stuff off them would negate a lot of their utility. Is there still a point to having shared computers ? Do people still do that ? Even my parents, who are in their late 60's and care little about technology both have their own personal laptops.

iOS doesn't show messages on my phone lock screen until it's authenticated me via Face ID. Presumably on a theoretical multi-user iPad, it'd do Face ID and then show me _my_ lock screen messages and not anyone else's who happens to have an account.

Sharing a computer doesn't mean keeping personal information off of it, it just means you want a device that respects your personal information and keeps it private (non-readable by other user accounts) by default.

My bet is that the user research would say the cast majority of iPhone usage is indeed personal, but that a major amount if iPad usage is shared, especially among children (and even moreso in poorer areas where an iPad-per-child isn't affordable). And I'd bet Apple knows this, but wants to maintain the fiction to encourage more sales.

It's like Amazon waiting forever to include Chromecast functionality to sell more Fire Sticks. I understand, but it's still degrading the user experience, and that just grates my cheese.

Oh wow, I've seen some mind bending arguments so far but I sure didn't expect you to defend Apple's condescending way of telling their customers what to do by telling people how they should eat their pizza.

I actually meant the opposite. Nobody is going to stop you from sharing your personal pizza, like it’s yours do whatever you want. But it’s weird to complain to the pizza joint about the portion sizes and that you’re still hungry after splitting one.

Like Apple isn’t misleading anyone, you know when you buy it that it’s a single user system with all the downsides that entails. It’s fine to say “I think Apple should support multiple users to cover my use-case” but not “how dare Apple not support my use-case.”

How dare my toaster not fit bagels! It’s a conspiracy I tell you to get you to also buy a separate bagel toaster!

Like are people really just blind buying devices without even looking to see if they do what you want them to do? If you’re requirements are “I need a tablet to share between me and my kids” why is an iPad even on the table?

Sure not buying Apple is always a solution but if we're continuing the pizza analogy then surely a restaurant that would refuse to bring you an extra plate and tableware would be considered to have bad service?

You can log out of iMessage and not set up email. It's silly that there aren't user accounts on the iPad at this point but you can get rid of most everything by logging out and setting up controls in Screentime.

Create a kid's account in a family, set up the device using this apple id. that's the correct way of setting up kid's devices anyway.

Macs are definitely not personal — you can trivially set up multiple user accounts.

You can, but the experience sucks for families. If you want shared access to your family photos or music collection, you kinda need a shared account. But you probably don't want your family members to read all your email, so you need separate accounts. And what if you want to email a photo from the shared account? You end up having to switch accounts all the time, and the experience sucks.

The result is that people just use web apps like Gmail instead of native apps, because it's a lot easier to sign in and out of services.

My son wanted to login to the desktop AirBnB because I wanted a PDF of a receipt, which he couldn't get on mobile. He logged in using his Google account on his phone. On his Windows and Mac laptops, with Chrome and Firefox he got errors. He just couldn't login. We cleared cookies, everything. Rebooted. Nothing would fix it. Of course, to start a chat with aBnB you need to login...

So, I agree. Every service should have separate credentials.

Yes, Apple ID is like a cookie that you can't delete.

My solution: use Linux :)

Are you using a Linux phone by any chance? Could you share some details? I've been thinking about it but I didn't pull the trigger because the alternatives I've been looking at all have shortcomings. Curious to hear more.

This is one of the things Google actually got right with Android. I can add as many Google accounts to my phone as I want. Anything that needs to be associated with a Google account lets me choose which account to use, and I can selectively decide what gets (and does not get) synced from each account (mail, contacts, photos, store purchases, etc.). Many apps will even let me switch between accounts easily and seamlessly.

I feel like several of your problems where you “have to” do this or that, you’re missing the value of iCloud “child” accounts that can be enabled to use the parent account’s things they didn’t pay for.

Especially for the literal kids, use a child account. But also use a child account for the work machine so it can use your apps but isn’t your personal messages and photos.

Child accounts don't fix the problem that it is a shared device.

I've never considered creating a fake child account for business use, but I have tried to create some fake Apple IDs for shared devices, so I didn't need to use personal credentials. Unfortunately Apple has blocked these fake accounts from accessing some services, so I had to fall back to using personal accounts.

> It's shared by multiple people. I need to log in with my personal credentials to download software from the Mac App store.

I thought this was solved with managed Apple IDs? https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT210737