How many Apple IDs should your family have?
gigaom.com
gigaom.com
Programmers have a bad habit of assuming that country of residence == language preference.
A worse practice is IP-to-location and then assuming language preference. Grrrrrr.
Did you know that there are more Catalan speakers in the world than people that speak Norweigan? I used to live in Spain. All websites assume you speak Spanish. That must really piss off Catalan speakers, all 11.5 million or so of them.
Ontario here. A few websites have been persistently trying to show me French. The fact that my dynamic IP sometimes shows up as being in Montreal doesn't help at all. But some websites just seem to assume that all Canadians speak French! Luckily, most Anglo-Canadians know by instinct where to locate the English version. We've been thoroughly trained to do that :)
I wonder what it's like in Switzerland.
My wife and I currently have Android phones. We have several choices for where we can buy music, apps, books and other content. Almost none of them allow us to share our purchases. Apps simply cannot be shared (please correct me if I am wrong on this point). Music can be shared but the process involves (1) purchasing a song on one of the available music stores, (2) connecting the phone to a computer, (3) downloading the song from the phone to the computer (incidentally, the only universal means of creating a backup), (4) connecting the other device to the computer (5) uploading the song.
Google Music does make things slightly easier. For one, there is less reason for backups. However, music purchased on one phone still has to end up on another person's phone via a computer. The situation is worsened by the fact that on Android your Google account is very deeply integrated into your phone experience. The only sensible solution I can think of is for us to create a separate account through which we purchase music, movies, apps, etc.
The situation is a bit better with Apple ID. At least here, as TFA points out, you can have a setup that allows you to not spend 2x or more on the same content, but also have individual accounts. However, the length of the article alone suggests that there is a problem.
The perfect solution would look something like this: a cloud-based drive with several areas: 1 GB of encrypted storage for private data, 20 GB for music and book storage, streaming capabilities for all videos. Anything in these areas should be sharable with a small set of people I choose to share it with. For example, when I buy a song or an app, it should automatically show up on my wife's phone. Bonus points for some kind of a parental control system (no rock n roll for my kids once I have them). Any photo I take should automatically be uploaded to the encrypted area but also optionally shared with my family. All the app data should automatically be backed up as well, so that I can continue using the app on my laptop from where I left off on my phone.
Note, that it is very important to also not share some things by default. For example, if I want to keep a copy of my private GPG key in the encrypted area, I do not want to share it with my wife. Another example would be a document with account numbers from my job: not something my family needs to see.
Obviously this is a tall order. Encryption means no capability to do de-duplication. Sharing apps is also a bit funky, especially I buy them from a third-party app store. However, this system would much more closely address the real-world patterns of how families use smartphones, computers and cloud storage. Whoever figures this out first will likely make a lot of money.
There is a reason I don't update my apps as often as I would like. It's because you can't just click update all, enter a password, and be done. No. You have to be careful when updating.
I cannot believe Apple's QA have ever looked at this element to their OS, or if they have, they simply don't care at all. And it's these parts that show how much Apple really cares about its software.
And let's not mention iTunes.
I hate updating apps.
Let's make it clear: I do not true iOS to do the right thing when I click update all and enter my passwords. I expect it to do the wrong thing and cause many problems.
Honestly that wouldn't really fix most of these problems which have grown out of big content licensing rules. For example country specific stores clearly grew out of the music licensing arrangements and their many legacy contracts that sold extranational rights to other groups.
For apps: if you stick to free apps, like most Android users do, the point is moot. If your family has more than ten devices, buying a second copy of that $5 app is honestly not a huge burden. If your spouse buys their own apps like any other adult, you can support up to 18 iPhone-toting offspring total, which seems reasonable.
For iTunes: I thought it had DRM-free music now? In which case, you can copy that music on all 200 of your extended family's iPods. What you can't do is let 200 people buy music in your name, but I don't see why you'd want to.
Everything else is unrelated to DRM. It is a mess, yes, but not for DRM reasons.
My Adult spouse an I have two iPhones and share an iPad. Sharing the one account (and thereby sharing applications) is great.
For example, even though Apple advertises "the App Store", there isn't an App Store. There's one per country. I've seen some cool apps mentioned on blogs and such that I would love to have, but even if they are free, if I'm not in the right country, I can't download them.
(Yes, I could probably 'jailbreak' my iPod, or sign up for an Apple ID with a fake address, or some other nonsense. Doesn't change the fact that Apple's DRM has such restrictions.)
It seems funny to me that Amazon has no trouble shipping pretty much any item from any country to any other country, but Apple can't deliver bits across borders.
The iPad, however, is probably more commonly shared among family members. I'd love to read my mail on our iPad, but I certainly don't want my brother to read them. And always typing in my password is definitely less convenient than just waiting for my desktop computer to boot or using my iPhone.
It’s difficult not to be cynical about this.
Yes, there are challenges that would need solved to add user accounts:
• Basic UI: how to add switching conveniently and yet unobtrusively?
• Relatively limited storage: What happens when you want to tote 5GB of music and your family member has 2GB of photos and a 1.1GB game on your 8GB shared iPad?
And yet, it’s certainly possible. The easy answer is they want everyone to have their own device because it means more profit for Apple.
I hope it’s on the iOS 6 shortlist.
To make it extra confusing, apple uses your email address as the way to identify the apple id but then also give you a way to change the email address, but only if its not from a me.com address:
Trivially so, since you said “no interest.” If they had none at all, why would they go so far as to actively support non-Apple services?
Relatedly, their aggressive support of the Web as a platform is by definition interoperable. Their best-in-class mobile browser (or nearly — source: PPK/Quirksmode) can almost be considered a universal interoperability module.
No google account, no Facebook account, no windows live ID either.
You should not have to sign up for anything to use your device to its full potential.
You genuinely dont need those cloud products despite the marketing to the contrary. Why do people assume that they NEED them?