Amber S
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This has gotten worse and worse and worse for me over time. It's now to the point where sometimes I have to sign my kids in multiple times in a row before one really sticks. And I can almost guarantee at least one sign-in per day. We have two Switches and it does seem to happen more regularly on the older (bought in 2017) one, but the younger (bought in 2020) one is not immune and I had to do 3 sign-ins yesterday on it. It is getting downright infuriating for me AND my kids. There is something fundamentally wrong with the way the Switch version is handling MS account auth and it needs to be fixed... PLEASE.
@John Brandenburg: I noticed from your description that you pressed B on the Switch to close the window - I'm 99% confident that cancels the transaction from the Switch side before it can complete the sign-in. After you verify the sign-in on your phone or laptop or PC, it says "you can close this window" but that's only referring to the browser window on that device, not the Switch window. I recently had to sign my kid into their Switch yet again and I noticed that there was some delay between authorizing the sign-in on my PC and the Switch getting notified. When it does get notified, the Switch automatically pops up the account info to confirm that you signed in with the expected account. And I remember this because, the last time I did it, it took long enough that I was starting to doubt that the authorization had worked by the time it finally kicked in.
For anybody/everybody reading this thread, here's are some tips that work for me:
1) REBOOT YOUR SWITCH. Any time I start having sign in weirdness, I just hard reboot the whole thing (I hold the power button, fully power off, and then manually turn it back on just to be safe) and every time except for maybe once, it's then let me log in again immediately. For me, the sign-in will last for a seemingly-random amount of time - it's lasted for weeks and it's lasted for minutes. It always breaks eventually but then I just do that again and usually we're good to go in minutes.
2) In general, go very slow and have a lot of patience. It takes a fair amount of time to sign in to the Microsoft account and it takes a fair amount of time for it to search for friends' games. Every time you take an action, WAIT. It might look like it's hung for a good 5-10 seconds sometimes. Give it more time than you think is reasonable and then give it even more time, because it probably needs it. I've had a lot more luck going very slowly than assuming something broke and starting over - as an engineer, I have a sneaking suspicion there are bugs in the error handling and transaction canceling code here, so I bend over backwards to avoid triggering them.
3) Make sure the Switch is near your WiFi router. I have noticed my kids getting signed out/dropped more-frequently when moving from room to room. I don't really know whether to blame the Switch itself or Minecraft (honestly, probably Minecraft for not handling blips gracefully) but, in the same spirit as going slow, keeping it stationary and right next to WiFi seems to help, at least anecdotally.
I want to be very clear that this is not ONLY an app focus or restarting issue - my kids can be actively playing online and get logged out of their MS accounts. I have had this happen 3 times in a 15 minute span. And sometimes the Switch will get stuck in a state where a cryptic error message pops up every time we try to sign in to the MS account and restarting the app doesn't actually help - in that case, we have to hard reset the Switch itself to sign in again.
I get that that the variety and vagueness of the problem description probably makes this hard to track down to a single problem. As a software engineer with 15 years of experience, that's probably because it's NOT a single problem. Something seems fundamentally wrong with the way the Switch implementation handles MS accounts. We have this problem across two different Switches, bought three years apart, and nothing similar happens with any other applications - for example, Mario Maker 2 works flawlessly online 100% of the time.