I work for a tablet manufacturer, and I spoke to an Android product manager at I/O last year about this.
According to him, this is a feature that pops up once in awhile, but they have a long list of stuff to do and this is just one of those things that always gets bumped out.
From my perspective as a platform dev, I'd like to get into some of the technical problems with changing this, but I could end up breaking some NDAs or something. I'll just say, when you start mucking around with adding login code, file system changes, and the current dmcrypt encryption, you hit lots of fun design problems.
Single user login is a design problem! When I hand my tablet off to someone they have access to my gmail, gtalk, facebook, twitter, imap email, browser sessions and dropbox.
Maybe the encryption doesn't matter?
By default in Windows users are hidden from each other stuff but the files aren't encrypted so only the FS permissions are stopping them from reading each others home folders.
I think the concerns are the interactions between user accounts. I don't think anyone is too worried about the hidden root account having access to your user account data.
> I'm more bewildered to why no tablets seem to have multi-user functionality.
That's the first thing I wondered about when Apple released the ipad: from the start, this looked like a family/eminently shareable device (and within a month you had reports of it being used as a shared family device, picked and left on the living room table for quick sessions of browsing or game), it felt weird that all the tablets were single-user, and the more time passes the weirder it is.
Speaking as a father of a 3-year-old, a separate profile for him would save me an immeasurable amount of frustration. "Figure out which folder the program I want is in" becomes really tiring after about the 600th time.
If you're on Android then Famigo Sandbox sort-of solves this.
It only lists a subset of apps (automatically adding child-friendly ones it finds, but then editable) and prevents access to the phone functionality, redirects ad links etc.
According to him, this is a feature that pops up once in awhile, but they have a long list of stuff to do and this is just one of those things that always gets bumped out.
From my perspective as a platform dev, I'd like to get into some of the technical problems with changing this, but I could end up breaking some NDAs or something. I'll just say, when you start mucking around with adding login code, file system changes, and the current dmcrypt encryption, you hit lots of fun design problems.