iOS 7 Only Allows Find My iPhone with Primary iCloud Account
While iOS7 may be a big leap forwards in most respects, the "Find my iPhone" feature has taken a big step in reverse. This useful feature is NO LONGER AVAILABLE for use with secondary iCloud accounts, ONLY your PRIMARY account.
This may not be a huge concern for most users, because many (including most first-tier tech reps at Apple I've spoken to) seem to believe that you can only have one iCloud account on a device. NOT TRUE. While you can only have one PRIMARY account, you can add multiple additional iCloud EMAIL accounts (go to Settings/Mail, Contacts & Calendars/Add Account/iCloud). In the last iOS, once you created a new, secondary iCloud email address, you could activate many iCloud features for use with the new account, including Mail, Calendar, Contacts, Reminders, Notes, Safari Data (which never actually worked), and Find My iPhone. Under iOS7, however, Find My iPhone is no longer available. Instead, a small paragraph below the new iCloud email account setup screen says "Only your main account can use Bookmarks, Photo Stream, Documents & Data, Backup, and Find My iPhone."
Consider two cases where this is a huge problem.
1) We have a large number of company iOS devices that we need to keep track of.
2) Personally, I have an iPhone and iPad, and so does my wife. So do our kids!
In both the above cases, we created a secondary iCloud account, we'll call it "Shared_Usersxxx@icloud.com", and added it as a secondary iCloud email address on ALL our iOS devices. In the setup screen we disabled everything EXCEPT "Find My iPhone". This account has a unique password, making it possible to see the location of ANY OR ALL the devices using the Find My iPhone App, WITHOUT having to share email, contacts, calendars, etc. among all these devices.
In our company, I can tract the location of any iOS device I gave to an employee, but his personal PRIMARY iCloud account is used to keep his mail, contacts, calendars, etc. secure. He shares this data between his iPhone and iPad, but NOT with everyone else. In my family, we all have our own primary iCloud accounts. I share mine between my iPhone and iPad; my wife and kids do the same. This allows us to keep our calendars, contacts, emails, etc. separated. But we all used the secondary iCloud email account ONLY with Find My iPhone. This allowed everyone in the family to see the location of everyone else, very nice in an emergency. Unlike the Find My Friends app, the device being located doesn't have to respond to a request to be found (very important when finding a lost or stolen device).
In both the above cases, we just log into the Find My iPhone APP on ANY iOS device, using the secondary iCloud account's email address and password (the email address is actually saved in the app, so you really only need to enter the password after the initial login). Viola! You can now see the location of any device that has that secondary iCloud account installed. And a person can still be untrackable if they wish, simply by turning off the Find My iPhone feature under the shared account's iCloud account settings on their device.
Alas, with iOS7 this is no longer possible. With the Find My iPhone feature only available for use with the device's PRIMARY iCloud account, there are only two ways to track another device:
1) Use the same primary iCloud account (which forces you to share other data and features you may not want to);
2) Log into the Find My iPhone APP with the PRIMARY iCloud email address and password of the person you want to track.
Either way, the person doing the tracking MUST have access to the PRIMARY iCloud credentials of the device they are tracking. This is a large security hole! Ask yourself: if you are a parent, do you really want your kids to have access to your primary iCloud account, including your mail, contacts, calendars, etc? Some people may not want their spouse to access that. In a company setting, do you want all your employees to be FORCED to share Documents & Data, Backup and Bookmarks, just to use the Find My iPhone feature? If they want to keep their mail, contacts, calendars, etc. separated from other employees, they will be forced to move these to a secondary iCloud account, which will no longer allow them to share Bookmarks, Photo Stream, Documents & Data or Backup. Why this ridiculous limitation?
The bottom line:Find My iPhone is now only useful for the primary iCloud account holder, and can no longer be used effectively between larger numbers of iOS devices, such as families or corporate institutions. This should be addressed in the next update to the iOS.
