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case 1: no apps. guest has to install apps. will guest have a itunes/android market account? does he enter his Credit card to buy paid ones he want to use?
case 2: apps with no data from real user. He opens up foursquare/yelp to look for a restaurant... has to create profile
Their approach is targeted at kids though, I'd love to see someone tackle the general purpose approach.
Sounds like a great project for someone with a lot of free time. I rememeber hearing that the guy who came up with what is currently the ios notification style was hired by Apple after his jailbroken hack.
The void is wide open for someone to solve this well and be rewarded for it
These guys are kind of working in this: http://www.famigo.com/ Their approach is targeted at kids though, I'd love to see someone tackle the general purpose approach. Sounds like a great project for someone with a lot of free time. I rememeber hearing that the guy who came up with what is currently the ios notification style was hired by Apple after his jailbroken hack. The void is wide open for someone to solve this…
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.
I 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…
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.
a phone in guest mode would be totally useless. case 1: no apps. guest has to install apps. will guest have a itunes/android market account? does he enter his Credit card to buy paid ones he want to use? case 2: apps with no data from real user. He opens up foursquare/yelp to look for a restaurant... has to create profile
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Prove that it isn't, officer.
No cellphones are allowed in top secret military locations in the US, because all can be remotely signalled to start recording audio. We know they'll turn a phone into a bug if they need to, so it's foolish to assume they wouldn't be able to get the real PIN.
A much more likely explanation for the policy involves abuse by the user, either intentionally or unintentionally. Cameras and USB sticks are similarly restricted.
Better yet, why hasn't anyone created an app that just simulates a guest mode? A launcher with two sets of home screens would be perfect. Or , you just disable your preferred launcher when handing your phone to a friend, revealing the mostly barren stock screens. It's as simple as hiding icons, since the apps might as well not exist if the icons aren't there (access doesn't actually need to be explicitly forbidden, p…
Not all games have a separation of user data. Some games basically only have one save slot, so that starting a new game wipes out the save data.
"Why Don’t Smartphones Have A Guest Mode?" Because dealing with multiple profiles and/or different profile types is a fucking huge giant pain the ass and a monumental amount of work! Xbox has local, guest, live silver, and live gold accounts. Dealing with all the different profiles and switching between is a nightmare. Urgh, no thanks.
At least two of the three most prominent smart phone roms are backed by operating systems that have long histories of (more or less successful) profile switching. It might in fact be a difficult problem, but it's one that has serviceable solutions and has for some time.
Operating systems have had user switching for years. But I'll bet only a small minority of Mac users even know this is possible, and even fewer have ever used it.
This is also why any app that handles sensitive information (including, arguably, the photo and video galleries) on a phone should have at least the _option_ to set an in-app PIN that's required before it opens up. Lots of folks hand their smartphone to their kids to play games and even if there's nothing sensitive on there, they might have things they don't want deleted like treasured photos and videos.
Privacy is important. But why not just avoid keeping weird stuff on your phone? Keep it somewhere else. Or say, "hold on let me log out of my bank app" or something.
>keep it somewhere else Where? Keep my naked girlfriend pics in a recipe box? Wtf are you even saying? I'd rather not turn into a dull prude just because apple is too lazy to implement a guest account on their unix OS. I'm trying to imagine how dull and colorless your life must be. I took the pictures with my phone. The obvious place to keep them is on my phone.