Got a tip for us?
Let us know
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.
Does anyone user separate user profiles on their ATV?
- Thread starter bowens
- Start date
- Sort by reaction score
We do the same in our house. The ATV's are setup under my Apple ID. But my wife, son and I each have our own profiles for the streaming services we subscribe to. Works pretty well that way for us.
The only benefit I could see, is not seeing my wife's cooking shows in the up next queue.
The Apple implementation of user profiles in tvOS is clumsy. If it were better done, the apps would be using it Better.
I can't wait until they put more effort into this feature. We're currently kind of using it - the AppleTV app will change the content based on the user that's signed in, and there's probably some other things like purchases tied to the other user.
Here's my short wishlist:
1) AirPods/AirPod Pros available under the signed in user. Being able to use AirPods on the TV are nice but the only ones that appear are connected to the main user who setup the AppleTV. Being able to have my wife choose her profile and then simply put on her AirPods and listen would be wonderful. Right now it's a total pain in the butt and way easier to just lend my AirPods to her.
2) Apps on the home screen should change based on the logged in user -- or at least offer that as an option. Then my apps and her apps could be different. An option to share the preferences or use different ones would also be nice -- since you may not want to have to sign back into apps across different profiles.
3) Fix the sign in bugs! One of our AppleTVs will not finish the Apple ID sign in for my wife's account -- all the others did just fine but this one errors with some arbitrary message basically saying try again in a few minutes. So now we simply stay signed into my user as the benefits of switching users seem to be minimal at the moment.
Here's my short wishlist:
1) AirPods/AirPod Pros available under the signed in user. Being able to use AirPods on the TV are nice but the only ones that appear are connected to the main user who setup the AppleTV. Being able to have my wife choose her profile and then simply put on her AirPods and listen would be wonderful. Right now it's a total pain in the butt and way easier to just lend my AirPods to her.
2) Apps on the home screen should change based on the logged in user -- or at least offer that as an option. Then my apps and her apps could be different. An option to share the preferences or use different ones would also be nice -- since you may not want to have to sign back into apps across different profiles.
3) Fix the sign in bugs! One of our AppleTVs will not finish the Apple ID sign in for my wife's account -- all the others did just fine but this one errors with some arbitrary message basically saying try again in a few minutes. So now we simply stay signed into my user as the benefits of switching users seem to be minimal at the moment.
DeifI’d, the thing is, once a platform sets a standard all the developers develop on top of, it’s hard to change it. Because then all the developers have to go and change their app.
So I don’t know that Apple TV will ever be an intuitively multi-user platform.
if you’ve ever used UNIX, you’d know what I mean. UNIX was multi-user from it’s inception when it was first developed in the 60’s or 70’s. And every user has their own configuration files for every single application. You compare that to how multi-user works on a PC operating system like Windows. Most of the time people don’t even bother to switch users when they sit down to use the computer. I imagine it’s the same on MacOS. But I haven’t used MacOS much.
So I don’t know that Apple TV will ever be an intuitively multi-user platform.
if you’ve ever used UNIX, you’d know what I mean. UNIX was multi-user from it’s inception when it was first developed in the 60’s or 70’s. And every user has their own configuration files for every single application. You compare that to how multi-user works on a PC operating system like Windows. Most of the time people don’t even bother to switch users when they sit down to use the computer. I imagine it’s the same on MacOS. But I haven’t used MacOS much.