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I'm more bewildered to why no tablets seem to have multi-user functionality. In my experience, tablets get shared far more often than phones.
by ConstantineXVI 15y ago
I'm more bewildered to why no tablets seem to have multi-user functionality. In my experience, tablets get shared far more often than phones.
- walexander 15y agoI work for a tablet manufacturer, and I spoke to an Android product manager at I/O last year about this. According to him, this is a feature that pops up once in awhile, but they have a long list of stuff to do and this is just one of those things that always gets bumped out. From my perspective as a platform dev, I'd like to get into some of the technical problems with changing this, but I could end up breaking some NDAs or something. I'll just say, when you start mucking around with adding login code, file system changes, and the current dmcrypt encryption, you hit lots of fun design problems.
- parfe 15y ago>you hit lots of fun design problems. Single user login is a design problem! When I hand my tablet off to someone they have access to my gmail, gtalk, facebook, twitter, imap email, browser sessions and dropbox. And that's just what I can recall on the fly.
- dhughes 15y agoThere are two your account and the hidden root account ;)
- jiggy2011 15y agoMaybe the encryption doesn't matter? By default in Windows users are hidden from each other stuff but the files aren't encrypted so only the FS permissions are stopping them from reading each others home folders.
- recoiledsnake 15y agoWindows 8 tablets (will) have this.
- masklinn 15y ago> I'm more bewildered to why no tablets seem to have multi-user functionality. That's the first thing I wondered about when Apple released the ipad: from the start, this looked like a family/eminently shareable device (and within a month you had reports of it being used as a shared family device, picked and left on the living room table for quick sessions of browsing or game), it felt weird that all the tablets were single-user, and the more time passes the weirder it is.
- ams6110 15y agoBut if the whole family could share it, they might only buy one instead of four.
- cheald 15y agoSpeaking as a father of a 3-year-old, a separate profile for him would save me an immeasurable amount of frustration. "Figure out which folder the program I want is in" becomes really tiring after about the 600th time.
- lparry 15y agoSpotlight could save you that frustration already.
- ZeroGravitas 15y agoIf you're on Android then Famigo Sandbox sort-of solves this. It only lists a subset of apps (automatically adding child-friendly ones it finds, but then editable) and prevents access to the phone functionality, redirects ad links etc.
- mcobrien 15y agoMy iPad app does something like this: http://switchapp.net/ http://switchapp.net/ It's not full user accounts, but a multi-user web browser. You can protect your bookmarks, logins & web history and it also has a guest mode.
- Tichy 15y agomuch easier to sell every family member their own tablet :-)
- jiggy2011 15y agoAgain this might be the simplicity issue, tablets are sold partly on the idea that they are simpler than PCs. Once you start adding stuff like login systems, seperate file permissions you start becoming a PC with a touchscreen.