Drew, I moved on from this issue six months ago when I discovered iMazing and have not been bothered by it since. The simple answer, get iMazing and use if for all your management of an iPhone or iPad. Just use Apple’s iTunes for what the name implies - music.
I seem to recall the steps I took to prove what was happening. I used the iTunes to start a backup of a device on which there was no password applied to the backup. The dialogue included a greyed out section that referred to using a password. This clearly showed that the OS had chosen a password for me and was about to embed the system with it. Lucky that I saw this and decided not to go ahead because I would have then had a password protected backup system for my iPhone / iPad for which I had no clue. I would get stuck if I ever wanted to do anything with the file handling because it would ask for a password that I never set.
Try it for yourself if you can actually work out how to do anything with your iOS device other than looking at media {music or movies}. The latest iOS upgrade {11.0.2} seems to have hidden the windows that I once was able to use to try to manage the APPS that had found their way onto my iOS device.
Don’t agree with the default position or you will end up like so many other users on this formum - stuck in an invidious position.
Remember we are dealing with a multinational company that has the highest stock valuation of any company in the World. Microsoft has become pale by comparison. You don’t get that way by being a Mr Nice Guy.
WHY AM I A BIT JADED WITH APPLE?
I know from personal experience. I had a software development company that made a healthy living off the strength and “simplicity” of the Macintosh OS. My sales curve showed a steady 30 degree climb from going public to the day OS-X arrived. Thereafter, my installed client base showed an inexorable 30 degree descent until I quit and gave up.
One of the reasons for my demise was that Apple forgot to include byte range locking in its initial OS-X release. If any of you are technically minded, this is the bit of code that holds multi-user databases together. Without it running, database corruptions creep in and you have catastrophe on your hands. That is what I suffered. Client after client rang in with database corruptions and we were swamped with work because of this.
Remember that Apple, unlike Microsoft have an all or nothing or my way or the highway approach to business. When they release a new something or other, all past versions stop dead simultaneously. There is no careful step forward, one step back with Apple. The day they release OS-X, you could not buy a new computer with the Classic version of OS running on it. This means I had to try to scrample a way to wrest control from the run-away train that I and my clients were riding. Apple were no help - they initially denied that there was any problem.
My client’s database corruptions went viral, my clients became angry and upset and left in droves. I never recovered. Even though at the time I had registered and paid good money to be a recognised Apple partner that meant nothing. I was told that byte range locking was not going to be fixed now or anytime in the future. I had to lump it or leave it.
Two years later as a minor software “security” update from Apple suddently included byte-range locking support. Too bad for me, the horse had well and truly bolted and my client base was decimated. I became depressed and never recovered that business. Apple has never acknowledged that they contributed to my demise or offered any compensation for killing a viable business due to their unnecessary behaviour.
If they were compassionate, in the very least they could have allowed new computers to run Classic OS until the byte range locking issue was fixed and I could move forward safely. No such offer came and no serious dialogue was ever entered.
The true irony of this sad story is that about five years prior to OS-X’s arrival and my company’s untimely death, I sought council from an “expert” from the company that supplied my database engine. I asked him during a fully paid site work session, lasting several days, whether I should stop using the model for DBMS and switch to SQL. I had no idea what SQL was because despite several attempts at getting something meaningful happening with SQL database engines, I was yet to see anything useful. Remember that this was more than 10 years ago before the days of ubiquitous broadband connections. {any of you old enough to remember that time?}
The “expert” carefully considered my question and said, “NO, don’t invest time and money in changing to SQL because your model of use is stable and reliable enough. The effort would not be worthwhile at this point in time.” I paid his bill and went on with the reassuring confidence that comes from paying a Consultant fees for their advice.
That turned out to be the worst business decision I ever made, following the Consultant’s advice. If I had followed instead my intuition and stopped feature creep and instead held what was best in field database at the time and rewrote it to run using SQL, when OS-X came along nothing would have happened. Things would have sailed along quite nicely without a ripple. When broadband became ubiquitously available, my client base would have expanded exponentially. My close to $1M annual turnover would now be around $10M, a healthy trend.
But alas, that did not happen for the reasons outlined above as well as issues of my own creation. Any coin has two sides to it and I have to admit to that. And so after getting this burden off my chest, I feel a lot better.
Apple are not alone at not being helpful and admitting liability when they cause havoc. DBMS providers are up there on the list of offenders as well. I lost my largest client to a problem that the DBMS provider refused to admit existed. The scenario was a twenty computer installation that one day started getting data corruptions on only one file of their records. They had a data file of only around 400Mb at the time and so by using a Modem {yes, modem, this is not a typo} I could retrieve their data file from interstate, pull it apart file by file and re-import the data, send it back to them and over a weekend and zero sleep, get them up and running again Monday AM when the doors opened and patients streamed in.
The second they entered a record in a specific file, the database reported corruptions, locked everybody out and the busy practice of fifteen Doctors was without their computer system. By the way, they had no paper records either and so this caused more than a minor degree of anger amongst patients, Doctors and staff. I was scared as **** because I had no idea what was causing the problem.
Who do you call when you have a DBMS related problem? The DBMS provider of course. Do you get any help from them - no of course. All you get is updates to fix hidden bugs and a big recurring bill. I found a fellow who purported to know something about this problem and spent several hundred dollars buying and using his tool to fix the problem. It didn’t, the problem remained.
Unfortunately I had to walk away from this site and lost not only them but all possible future referrals from this keystone site. A whole sector of the Medical Marketplace was lost to me - General Practice. This was not a good time for me as you could imagine.
Several years later I happened to think about the problem and tried some tinkering to see if I could identify the problem. I had a good system of archiving incrementally and I could load several different versions of my interepreted DBMS application and the version of data appropriate to this and noticed something weird. In a field called RSN (record sequence number) a current application had a field labelled “Allow Nulls” greyed out. This means the user cannot change the default setting which at that time was “OFF”, meaning “Do not allow NULLS”. For anyone who knows a bit about database properties, NULLS are a mystery, a bil like black holes in Cosmology. The current version did not allow for NULL values on a RSN field. The Record Sequence Numbers are automatically assigned for each and every record that is created, starting at 1 and going to the last number entered. Some records are deleted along the way but deleted records RSN’s are not recycled. And so, to work out how many records were ever created in a file, insert a fresh record and see its RSN.
If there is a record with a NULL RSN, the database does not know what to do with this file and cannot handle any record in that entire file. One record with a NULL RSN amongst a million will make the whole file collapse. This is what was happening in my case. But the current version of the DBMS did not allow this setting to be made.
By carefully back-tracking, I saw that earlier versions of the DMBS had a radio button that the programmer could set to be either on or off for RSN’s. This means that unwittingly, the programme was allowing the creation of a file with at least one record with a NULL value RSN. This would be incompatible with DB stability. This was the cause of my problem. It was caused by a problem that was recognised by the writers of the DBMS and subsequently removed. However, when cornered into recognising that they had allowed the problem to occur and themselves took steps to fix the problem, denied that this was the case saying that was complete rubbish.
At that stage of my career I had yet so suffer an even greater blow with the arrival of OS-X and so did not want to muddy a tenuous relationship between my DBMS provider and myself. Given half a chance, I would like to have my day in court now.
BACK TO THE PROBLEM OF AUTOMATED PASSWORD SETTING
Getting back to the point I was trying to make: Automated background setting of passwords happens in iTunes and that is irrefutable. Don’t use an Apple product to back up your iPhone or iPad. Use a third party with whom you can have a meaningful dialogue. If you can find a business that actually talks like two sensible adults who converse back and forwards, hold onto them and support them. Apple never listens, it merely broadcasts its view of the world. Despite this, I still prefer apple OS everything over any alternative because it makes the most intuitive sense of the lot.
