Apple Family Sharing Now Includes Subscriptions

We all are facing a bit of subscription fatigue when it comes to all of our services and applications we want to use. Especially when you find an application you want to use with your spouse or child, only to find out that you need to pay again or increase to a ‘Family Plan’ to both use it.

Well, Apple has recently announced that developers can now allow their customers to share their subscriptions with their family members via the ‘Family Sharing’ feature available to all Apple users.

You can now enable Family Sharing for auto-renewable subscriptions and non-consumable in-app purchases, allowing users to share their purchases with up to five family members.

– https://developer.apple.com/news/?id=4zbvn7u9

Apple Documentation

This is a great feature and hopefully, a lot of developers will enable this in their apps so families can save some money when multiple family members want to use the same application that requires a subscription to access all of its features.

Some of you may not even be aware of what family sharing even is, so here is a brief explainer about ‘Family Sharing’ and then I will walk you through the setup process and how to make sure you are sharing your subscriptions.

What is Family Sharing?

With Family Sharing enabled family members can share app purchases and services so a second purchase is not required. For example, if you and your spouse want to use the same task manager application, you can purchase the application once, and then anyone in your ‘family’ can download that app for free. Another example would be Apple Arcade. Once the service is purchased the entire family has access to enjoy the service without needing to purchase it again for their devices.

Family Sharing lets you and up to five other family members share access to amazing Apple services like Apple Music, Apple TV+, Apple News+, and Apple Arcade. Your group can also share iTunes, Apple Books, and App Store purchases, an iCloud storage plan, and a family photo album. You can even help locate each other’s missing devices.

– https://www.apple.com/family-sharing/

Apple Family Sharing Website

Child Accounts

Any member of your family under 13 is required to be a member of a family and cannot have their own independent Apple ID. When your child reaches “adulthood”, they can take this Apple ID with them into their own private Apple life.

The child account is nice because you can set all sorts of limits on purchases and screen time once this is setup.

How to Setup Family Sharing

1. Open the Settings App on your iPhone
2. Tap on your name at the top of the list (This will open up your iCloud settings)
3. Tap on Family Sharing
4. Tap Add Member
5. Now select if you want to invite someone to join or to create a child account
6. If you selected Invite a person it will bring up the share menu and you can choose to message/email anyone the invite. Once that person has followed the instructions sent to them they will now be apart of your ‘Family’
7. If you selected to set up a child, you will need the following information for your child
   1. First name
   2. last name
   3. Birthday
   4. Email Address that will be associated with your child

How to share subscriptions with your family

The subscription sharing will happen automatically on all new subscriptions but it does not happen automatically for all your current subscriptions. You will need to manage your subscription and add it to your family account. Here is how to do that.

1. Open the Settings App on your iPhone
2. Tap on your name at the top of the list (This will open up your iCloud settings)
3. Tap on Subscriptions
4. Locate the subscritpion you would like to share with your family
5. Turn on ‘Share with Family’

If you do not see the option to ‘share with family’, this is because that developer has not opted into this program. Some developers make their own ‘Family Plans’ that have different pricing, or they have not decided on if they want to allow this functionality.

Overall I hope most developers opt into this option as I think it will help out families in these trying times and also increase the app’s user base. Alas, it will not work for all but hopefully, this feature saves your family a few dollar bucks.