iOS Family Sharing (and more generally iOS) complexity
Context
OK, this post will probably look like ranting - and it probably is. But in the
past months/years, I noticed that I was struggling more and more to navigate iOS
intuitively.
That was not such a great deal, since my daily driver is Sailfish OS - I use iOS
on my professional phone, which mostly involves email, Slack and Teams.
But I still maintain the different iOS devices in my family, so I need to stay
on top of a few things, including how to use some of its nice features.
The problem
As part of my ongoing effort to "re-internalise" as many things as I can at home
and using Open Source, I moved my wife's password manager from 1password to
Keepass XC.
I wasn't satisfied with the previous iOS app I used (KeePass Touch), so I looked
for options, and found KeePassium Pro to be a much better fit. I bought the pro
version : we are sharing passwords so my wife had to be able to open multiple
databases on her iPhone.
Since KeePassium Pro supports Family Sharing, that meant that I could use the
same license within the family.
Once I had it installed on my iPhone, I tried doing the same on my wife's iPhone, but really struggled to find how to do it.
iOS complexity
I know I'm being a bit harsh here - Apple keeps adding new features to iOS, so it's inevitable that the overall user experience is less "smooth".
In my case, what I tried to do is installing KeePassium Pro from the App Store, but when trying so, it would tell me that I had to pay for it... which I didn't want to, since I already bought it and wanted to take advantage of the sharing capacity.
It took me a bit of time to understand what was going on:
- the person who bought an app needs to enable "Purchase Sharing" in its Family settings,
- then on the other iOS device, you must go in the App Store, click on your profile,
- then "Purchased",
- then "Family purchases", where you'll find in my case KeePassium Pro.
Same issue with Screen Time
Apple's "Screen Time" feature (basically Parental Controls) also suffers from
complexity.
It's far from intuitive: every time I want to do something, I have to think and
half the time I screw up and end up in the wrong menu, losing time.
Not to mention the number of bugs Screen Time has, e.g. when my kids send a
request for more time and either I do not receive the notification, or when I
accept, it does nothing on their device...
Wrap Up
Nonetheless, it shouldn't be that hard to use basic features such as Family Sharing.
I clearly remember, when switching to iOS (from Symbian), that it struck me that
Apple put all of the OS settings in the Settings app!
They did it right back then, as compared with Symbian whose settings were all
over the place, making it super hard to configure things.
These days, with iOS including a lot more features, it looks like Apple needs to refine this.
I am not that much into rants against iOS or MacOS, but I'd say that the same is true when I look at the Settings app in the latest MacOS Ventura: Apple is trying hard to have something similar to iOS / iPad OS, and a lot of folks (including myself) are not convinced.
I digress, but do we really need a new mobile or desktop OS every single year, Apple?
Tags: IT