"My theory is that you could eliminate the need for creating accounts since most people only usually use one device."
I think that's a very risky assumption, and only bound to be less-true as time goes on.
And is a nightmare if your device is stolen.
agreed, tablet + phone is quite common for example
Re:People (understandably) hate to register
by SalimoS on Thursday June 12, 2014 @09:13AM
(#7883141)
but tablet + phone have generally the same iCloud/google account and event if the device is stoled you can recover the account !
As you said CloudKit provides a very efficient approach for this.
With CloudKit the app get an unique persistant identifier related to the iCloud account. The cons are it only works through Apple devices for now.
But if you have an iOS only app, it's so easy to identify the user through all his devices without asking him anything.
And if it loose his phone or use the app on another device, his CloudKit ID is persistant (and related to your app(s) only, not global).
There are a few drawbacks to this approach such as a user losing their device. Essentially all of their history would be lost with it unless you used something like CloudKit to back the users info up. The problem with an API like CloudKit is that it isn't cross platform (yet). A user with multiple devices could join the same game, but I don't see how that would stop users with multiple emails from accomplishing the same thing.
Just something I was thinking about, but I do agree with not creating more accounts. There needs to be a more elegant solution.