Since I took the iPad home for the first time and as we got more and more addicted to it we’ve been missing multi-user support. Currently you can not have separate accounts on the device so you can efficiently share it with other people. That would allow a more personal usage of the device for each user I understand Apple prefers each person in the household to buy his own iPad but from what I mostly see around that is not how it works.

This represents an annoyance because you can’t have separate logins, so every iPad user could log into his area and have all his apps and settings ready to use. I find myself logging in and out of several websites to be able to get to my stuff when I was not the last one to use the device.

I have thought about this inconvenience a couple of months ago and I wondered that even if it is not as efficient it could be done on an App basis, meaning that each App would implement it’s unique user authentication allowing for multiple accounts (not necessarily simultaneously logged in). But I expected that since this was something missing from the OS itself and knowing the way Apple fights for the ecosystem control I would not expect them to approve Apps with this feature.

So it came as a surprise when they did approve Flipboard’s latest version which includes multi-user support and that is a good thing. I’m not sure whether they would have the same approach towards a low profile App, but they did it for Flipboard and that can lead us to wonder if they will release native multi-user support for iOS itself (which I think is not relevant for the iPhone being a de facto personal device, but the iPad being in the living room is a different story).