The suggestion to setup a separate iCloud account per kid is great, except that the TOS prohibits it for kids 12 and under: http://www.apple.com/legal/icloud/e

The suggestion to setup a separate iCloud account per kid is great, except that the TOS prohibits it for kids 12 and under: http://www.apple.com/legal/icloud/en/terms.html http://www.apple.com/legal/icloud/en/terms.html With regards to the "proper" way to setup an iPod. I'd be willing to be that the vast majority of users have no clue whatsoever. I'd also be willing to bet that most users use the same login uid and pwd for both services, which means that when asked for credentials they automatically enter that info. Grandma has no clue as to the finer points of how to setup an iPod for the kids. Aside from that, Apple gives no guidance whatsoever on "best practices". Users turn on the device and just enter what they are prompted to enter without any options to learn about the consequences of their choices. Given that, it is perfectly reasonable to expect most people to not even consider some of the posted ideas. Most of the comments seem to have ignored the fundamental premise of my post: Group account management and multi-user capabilities are sorely missing on iOS. There are a ton of use cases beyond the kids-with-ipods example. Yes, you can hack and patch your way around solving the specific issues I presented. We've already done it, of course. This is not a solution to the greater underlying issue. Put plainly, I ought to be able to have full command of my "fleet" of iDevices as the administrator. This includes adding and removing users, enabling user access to different devices, selecting which apps are available to each user, selecting who can see what data (for example, photos) and managing guest accounts on the various devices. It sounds complicated, but, well, either Apple is a great software/UI company or they are not. They ought to be able to make something like this usable. Here's another use case for multiple accounts: Development. As far as I have been able to tell, there is no way to have a development and shipping version of your app on the same device. In other words, I want to be able to show and test my shipping app while, at the same time, also have my latest development build installed. I have to admit not having researched this too far, but it seems that it isn't possible. The only way is to actually call your development version something else. If you had multiuser capabilities you could have a "dev" user where all of your development builds and experiments could live. Your normal user would be nice and clean and only have the shipping version.