How many times have you handed over your iPhone or iPad and wished it had a guest mode that allowed that person to use Safari and other apps but w/o your credentials, and without all your alerts, settings, etc ?
Seems like a super useful & social thing, and with alerts, check-ins and other 1-click actions on a device — it’s harder and harder to use someone elses’s device without it buzzing and interrupting every 30 seconds.
The only device I’ve seen so far that had a guest mode was an early Chromebook prototype that I received a couple of years ago:
And looks like they kept that feature:
Chromebooks also offer the ability to browse without signing in. We call this function Guest Mode. When Guest Mode is used, Chrome runs with the usual privacy measures of incognito mode, but none of the browsing data, including downloads, will stick around. When you exit Guest Mode or reboot your Chromebook, the browsing data is deleted.
Strange that iOS doesn’t have this built-in.
Even OSX has this feature (you have to enable it under System Prefs > Users & Groups). I totally agree that there should be something like this on iPads especially.
ya, seems like a mystery as to why it was left out of iOS. They could call it “kids mode” too 🙂
Allegedly, they’re looking into it for the iPad, where there would be the most benefit. iPads really feel like they’re meant to be family devices.
Oh interesting. Apple has a way of holding back some obvious features and then releasing them later, and usually in a much more polished and smart way (thinking of copy & paste for example).
Add me to the +1 for a guest mode feature. Can only hope that Apple is holding out on this feature for iOS 7 or something.