Accounts On Shared Devices

What Android TVs and the new iPads have in common? They don't know how to organize the users around them.

The world was pretty simple with personal devices. My phone. My tablet. My laptop. My account. My phone shares the photos with my laptop, because both devices operate in a context of the same account.

But the problem arises with devices that - by design - are shared. A TV set is a crown example. What user account should the Android TV sign with? And there is no obvious answer to that question. I ended up setting up a new account that I call the "Family Account". Both the TV and the Android TV players are signed to the Family account. This setup is not that bad. Each family member can share selected content with the Family account. Like photos. And then the TV set can go and run the DayDream screen saver displaying randomly the photos it has access to. At least in theory.

The real life shows the idea is still not fully supported. Android TV screensaver can grab the Picasa photos, but only the account owns, not ones shared with it. So the workaround is to log on to the Family account and upload a set of photos directly. Which is really a nonsense - why have two copies of a photo set in the cloud? While a system of access rights should be enough.

Uploading the set to the second account is not that straightforward. The Picasa Desktop application has the option to "sync" with the Cloud. But only with one cloud account. So I had to revert to the web version of Picasa (picasaweb.google.com), log as the Family and upload the photos manually. A dirty workaround.

The same applies to the iPad Pro. Potentially it is a great family device. One that could sit on a living room table and could access all the information the family members have shared with it. And even switch context on demand to add content of the currently logged family member. iOS devices have fingerprint readers. But they are only used to authenticate a user (yes/no) instead of bringing up the full context of the user (because iOS does not support multi-user setup at all).

Actually Amazon Kindles are in some way closest tho the solution we need. They have device email addresses. So I can grab any content a Kindle understands and email it to the device. Then it belongs to that device.

OS vendors have to solve the problem of shared devices. Today all we have are workarounds. Until we have a clear recipe on how to set up accounts on shared devices, the adoption of them in living rooms (TVs) and on roads (cars) will still be limited.