If a friend or family member wants to borrow your iPad for a few days or weeks, here are some ways to let them use your iPad without giving them access to your personal information.
iPads are stylish devices, but not everyone uses them enough to justify purchasing Apple’s tablet. If you’re like many users, you’ll probably only find an iPad useful when you’re on a long flight or on a road trip, but you can only do them a few times a year. This is where borrowing an iPad comes in handy, and knowing that someone with an iPad can pay off big time.
But what if you’re the owner of the iPad and a friend or family member asks you if they can borrow the iPad for a few days? You obviously don’t want to give them as-is, because most likely your entries have been saved and there is probably other personal information you don’t want them to have access to.
The good news is, from using the Accessibility options to making use of some jailbreak tweaks if your iPad is jailbroken, there are several ways to prepare your iPad to lend it to someone else for a while. Let’s look at some of these ways.
guided access
A nifty feature in iOS 7 is Guided Access and under . Essentially, Guided Access lets you lock your iPad into a single app, and those who borrow your iPad can’t click the Home button to go back to the home screen and open another app that could possibly contain your personal information. .
So if you just want to give someone access to Safari for web browsing and nothing else, Guided Access lets you do that. To set it up, all you have to do is enable it in Settings and then triple-click the Home button to open and set the app you want the other person to access and set the parameters for the feature.
However, seeing how your friend or family member will want to play games and do other things besides just accessing Safari, this isn’t really the best solution, so only use this feature in certain situations.
Guest Mode Jailbreak Tweaks
If you have a jailbroken iPad, your options are much clearer as it’s a really useful jailbreak tweak for those situations. Guest mode is like Guided Access, but on steroids. Friends can use your iPad and access the apps you have installed using the Guest account, but you can control which apps and features are blocked and which are free.
There’s also a jailbreak tweak called Slices that lets you store multiple user accounts for any app you have on your iPad, so friends who borrow your iPad can add their own accounts to social apps without deleting your own login. . Again, this isn’t a completely foolproof method, but these will have to be done until we get full support for multiple user accounts on the iPad.
Backup and Factory Reset
Honestly, if you want to lend your iPad to a friend, the best option is to back up your iPad and reset it to factory settings, so the borrower can make it his own for the duration of his purchase. Let them sign in and put movies and music on iPad using their Apple ID information without having to interfere with your own content. Then, when they’re done, you can have them factory reset the iPad.
When you get iPad back, you can easily restore from a backup and have your iPad back up and running in no time, with all your apps, games, and settings you installed before you. deleted for the first time.
Of course, letting someone borrow your iPad can be risky business, especially if a friend is indecisive or unreliable. That’s why we recommend that you always lend your expensive devices to people you can trust, such as very close friends and family members.
