Problem

We had a power outage at work and even though my work laptop has a battery but the wifi network needs electricity to work. After a few minutes of internet suffocation, I decided to share the internet on my iPhone and keep working. But it was then that I discovered iPhone wasn’t really built with the ambition of being in everybody’s hand. My company has an interesting policy of giving every employee an iPhone and apparently I wasn’t the only one who was sharing his phone’s internet. So I saw something like this when trying to connect my Mac to my iPhone:

Good for Apple, I felt like this:

So naturally I went to the most logical place to change the hotspot name to something customised in order to find it. But there’s no such settings:

There’s no such setting so the first thing I do after being connected to the Internet is search for how can it be done. Turns out you have to change your phone’s name in order to change the hotspot’s name. It may sound logical but is pretty limiting. See how HTC One allows you to choose your hotspot name (needless to say this opens up in hotspot settings where it belongs):

But for iPhone, you’re supposed to leave the hotspot settings, go to General > About and chance your phone’s name:

A little unexpected but as a user put it “let down by apple yet again! i jailbroke my iphone 4 n installed an app called myWi it allows you to change ssid” (source).

The irony is that Apple is famous for paying attention to user experience but in practice there are many simple cases like this that are problematic.

Solution

Allow the users to edit their hotspot SSID name in the settings of Personal Hotspot.