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Comment by saosebastiao | Hacker News Reader

The unexpected appleID problem is, in my opinion, a world stopping bug...the kind that would cause a code red meltdown if it wasn't fixed 24 hours. This bug has been reported for years, with no resolution. The apple stores pretend the problem doesnt exist or they give you the runaround because their product that "Just Works" doesnt have a fix for it yet. My wife, who was a hopeless apple junkie, has decided that her current iPhone5 will be her last apple product...with her continued frustration with AppleId authentication being the straw that broke the camels back.

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I read the whole article, and I read all the HN comments (so far), but I still have no idea what the "unexpected appleID problem" is. Care to explain, for the unintiated like me?

When it prompts you to log in, it will pull up your appleID for you, but it gets it wrong. It will pull up some random other appleID...sometimes an old one you created for iTunes using a hotmail account you haven't checked since 2004, but sometimes a completely random other person's appleID. The authentication is unpredictable too...my wife has successfully signed on to her current account using an old password and successfully signed on to an old account using her new accounts password. Most of the time she can't sign on at all.

How is that even possible? What could be the possible rationale for keeping old passwords stored? Crazy.

Normally it would to be prevent users from reusing their most recent N passwords, for security. I don't believe Apple does that anywhere, though.

I can confirm that they do.

I suppose thinking about it, as long as they're hashed and salted, it's less of a problem... but it's still crazy that the system could fail that way.

You're assuming it's intentional. The first thing that comes to my mind is inconsistent state between multiple authentication servers.

Sign on to what? iCloud? Is there a forum thread or discussion somewhere that actually describes this in more details?

I've never gotten this before.

https://discussions.apple.com/thread/4342193?start=0&tst...

If trying to juggle more than one apple ID in the same storefront is breaking the camel's back, she's in for a world of soul crushing disappointment with any less UX polished product -- which is pretty much all the rest of them.

With my much less polished Android UI, at least I can use my phone.

Someone can't use an iPhone because they're juggling Apple IDs?

First, it supports multiple IDs, the limit is one ID per storefront or sync.

Second, if this isn't about multiple IDs but about multiple addresses for a single ID, and if you don't like it supporting the old addresses, go to http://appleid.apple.com and manage them. You can update, edit, and remove old email addresses, decide what your primary one is, etc. I find it helpful to ensure 100% of all services across all devices are using the same exact ID aka email address; one way to enforce this is to be sure your appleID account only has one listed.

On the other hand, if she has inadvertently created multiple IDs over the years, she needs to either settle on one ID per service (my wife has one for music, one for apps, one for iCloud), or she needs to ditch the extra ones and standardize on a single one.

To tell if they're the same or multiple accounts, again, go to http://appleid.apple.com/ and log in with the one you think is the master, be sure the others are listed. If not, they're separate IDs.

None of this stops her from using her phone. Conveniently, all these phones fine with or without the ID.

FWIW, on my Galaxy Nexus I find managing multiple Google Accounts and cloud data sync more precarious. Sure, there's an easy radio button to pick accounts in the Google Play store, for example, but once I made sure I'm using the same ID across devices I've never had a bookmarks, contacts, calendar, or messages sync issue with iCloud, while I am having to go in and reset sync settings for bookmarks, contacts, etc., every couple weeks on Jellybean. And I usually don't know the sync is broken again until I notice something's missing, check sync settings, and see the broken sync alert.

She doesn't use multiple IDs. She only uses one. But in order to make things work, she has tried everything in the book, including trying to sign into her old account when this stupid bug pops up.

And no, she can't use the phone as it was advertised. She has multiple apps that use iCloud for storage, and every time this happens, she just stops using the apps, as it can literally take hours of trying before she can successfully sign into iCloud.

> She doesn't use multiple IDs. But... trying to sign into her old account...

Sounds like more than one. She needs to quit using the phone with "old" IDs, she's confusing herself and the device.

Get logged into https://appleid.apple.com/ and get it sorted out there. If you can't log into that, get on phone with Apple support until you can. As long as you didn't two step auth it, the phone support can and will help.

I'm not trying to debate, btw, I'm trying to legitimately help. Like most of us here, we end up being the support person for our family's devices, and I have seen people get themselves in a jam w/ the ID before. Clearly defining the Primary Apple ID won't be resolved until it's clearly resolved in the web interface.

You should qualify that statement, while no system is perfect, Apple seems to be the only one with a fundamentally broken cloud model.

I don't need to qualify it at all. A wife rejecting the iPhone 5 over AppleID frustration is going to have to use something else. There are things that spec higher, are more hackable, or more "open", etc., but nothing with the iPhone's level of wholistic user experience polish.

So if the corner case of swapping user IDs for purchased items is enough to dump a phone, she's going to be desperately unhappy with the other alternatives out there which currently have countless more normal user UX annoyances.

You seem to have bought into the marketing, as an owner of a Nexus 4 I am unfamiliar with the "UX annoyances" that you are referring to. Could you be specific?

As an owner of a Galaxy Nexus (TMobile) running the latest Jellybean, I suspect you've forgotten what it's like to pick the device up for the first time, if you claim the user experience is as polished for "normal" (non-tech) people. You also would be alone among the crowd of Android journalists who love the OS and talk about how each release is more polished, closing the UX gap. Skim any honest pro Android site for a catalog of annoyances remaining.

Here's one for a new user: Let's say I'm looking at apps on my home screen, swipe left or right to see more apps. Great. I install something new. Not on the home screen. Swipe left or right. Not there either. This is an actual problem for normal users.

I also don't like having to pull out the battery every few weeks because the phone is frozen when I picked it up off the dock. This can happen from any background app. In the most recent case, turns out it was the foreground app, a clock called "Alarm" that I had coming up when docked in the landscape dock. Switched to Daydream, that problem went away, at least. But having to unplug the battery before I can make a call, definitely an annoyance. Glad it has a removable battery though, disassembling and reassembling the battery saves me having to press Home + Power for 10 seconds.

Ha, here's another one, as I'm writing this.

I just took a picture to talk about the UX of finding and sending that picture, but when I went into Apps and swiped left to look for Gallery (seriously, we can't just call it Photos?), the phone froze. Now I'm looking at the first page of icons half off the left of the screen, above a dimmed set of the second page icons. It's still stuck there as I type this. But the phone isn't frozen, I was able to take a screenshot of the built-in Apps browser being stuck halfway between two pages:

https://www.dropbox.com/s/z04qqbn4a93sxlb/Screenshot_2013-03...

As I'm finishing this paragraph, it's still stuck. By contrast, I haven't seen an iOS device crash swiping between the app icon pages.

While finishing describing the above, the phone dimmed, and then locked, as it should. I unlocked using face recognition, and was looking at home screen. Tapped to browse apps, and ... still frozen halfway between two apps pages.

This is native core functionality, simply not working. And like now, these things happen when trying to do something useful. That's a user experience annoyance.

From what you describe you have a defective phone, you should get it replaced, your experience with your phone freezing isn't typical at all. My Nexus 4 has never once froze on me.

Also the Play Store has a default option called "auto add widget"[1] that adds a shortcut to your home screen of any newly installed app, I personally hate that default behavior and always uncheck that option.

Is that all you could come up with for UX annoyances?

I personally think the experience on Android and Jellybean in particular is first class, if you just take things like the notification shade, the intents system and widgets, the UX on Android is unmatched.

[1]http://howto.cnet.com/8301-11310_39-57471256-285/how-to-stop...

> Is that all you could come up with for UX annoyances?

Nope, but I refuse to be trolled by someone suggesting there aren't any. Just because YOU may not be annoyed, does not mean there isn't consensus that it still has a ways to go.

My phone didn't freeze when swiping the apps pages. Only the UI for swiping the apps pages froze. The rest of the phone, and all other running apps, are fine. That's not a defective phone. That's defective software.

Note that I never said Android Jellybean wasn't first class. I said if the woman is ready to dump a phone over trying to use an old account ID, she's going to have bigger problems with other operating systems which are not yet as polished.

“... A related issue is that the iOS interface is simply cleaner and more user-friendly than any Android interface I'd yet to see. One of Apple's slogans is "It just works." Well, actually sometimes it doesn't work. iTunes, for example, has been annoying me for years now. But, when it comes to device interfaces, iOS does just work. Android implementations, far too often, doesn't.“

“So, yes, Android does more today than Apple's iOS promises to do tomorrow, but that's only part of the story. The full story includes that iOS is very polished and very closed, while Android is somewhat messy and very open.”

— http://www.zdnet.com/blog/open-source/android-already-offers...

If you cannot imagine any UX annoyances, then most likely you fall into the “Android fans can be blind to its faults just as much as the most besotted Apple fan” camp.

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