How to Enable Family Sharing in iOS and macOS

Contacts

Its also frustrating that you can't share a contact list via Family sharing, the only way of doing it is by creating a dummy iCloud account, turning off contacts in the primary account then adding the dummy iCloud and only turning on contacts from this account. Painful as this sometimes confuses 'My Info' for Siri and address filling in Safari unless someone has found a work around?

DTphonehome said:

Big step in the right direction for Apple, but they definitely need to pump up the parental controls to fine tune what services a kid can use, and for how long. For example, you should be able to set 1 hour of movie or game time on a weeknight, more on a weekend, and 2 hours of book time. I believe Amazon does this.

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Wouldn't it be better if you personally control what your child does instead of trusting a device to do so? Be a parent!

It caused everyone in my "Family" to no longer be able to make any downloads or purchases. Tried logging in and out for everyone, to no avail. It first said "Please verify your payment information" and we were given a blank form that could not be filled in. Then I was told at any purchase that this item had already been purchased by another member of the family, which isn't true, and I could not download anything.

So nope! We're just going to keep signing in and out and using the same Apple ID. It's far less hassle than this.

ugadawg94 said:

Another issue is the apple ID and the date of birth. I like many created kids accounts before Apple had kids accounts. Now those accounts are locked in as adults because of the date of birth in the Apple ID.

Apple supports solution was to delete the Apple ID and start over. In doing so I would lose the very nice @me.com email that both of my kids have.

Apple really needs to get a grip on the management functions of these IDs. We need and period to be able to merge and update IDs. I have an iTunes, which is not the same as the iCloud, but sure would be nice to merge all those into one.

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Sooooo you lied to create an account and explicitly broke Apple's terms of service, and you expect Apple to provide a fix for you? Seems like if you had followed the rules you wouldn't have this problem...

ugadawg94 said:

Another issue is the apple ID and the date of birth. I like many created kids accounts before Apple had kids accounts. Now those accounts are locked in as adults because of the date of birth in the Apple ID.

Apple supports solution was to delete the Apple ID and start over. In doing so I would lose the very nice @me.com email that both of my kids have.

Apple really needs to get a grip on the management functions of these IDs. We need and period to be able to merge and update IDs. I have an iTunes, which is not the same as the iCloud, but sure would be nice to merge all those into one.

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It is possible to change the date of birth on the account in order to make it a child's apple ID. There is a limit on how many times the DOB can be changed, every 9 months I think, but it does solve the problem.

jadot said:

I may have completely missed the point here, but is Family only for sharing purchased content? What about all of the CDs I ripped into iTunes years ago?

I pay for Match - can my wife access that centralised "shared" library?

I shouldn't even be having to ask these questions, and there shouldn't need to be a "How To" either.

Apple don't seem to be able to communicate How Any Of their new Services Work.

Family sharing,
Hand off.
iCloud drive.

No. It doesn't "Just Work"

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Article says "Non-shareable content includes songs added to iTunes Match from outside of the iTunes Store,"
If iTunes match successfully matched a CD, your family will have access to this CD. However, it seems that if the CD was not matched, and was instead manually uploaded from your comp to Match for your account, they can't access it.

That's too bad, and I don't even remember how to check what was matched successfully or not. This is part of what is just supposed to work. I know I have at least a couple CD's that are in the iTunes store available for purchase, but still didn't get matched correctly, so it uploaded it. Because of this, my family can't listen to it? Smh.

It would be nice to see a thorough compare/contrast/conflict analysis of Home Sharing vs. Family Sharing. I'd do it myself if I wasn't worried about inadvertently locking out an iPhone or iPad for an account for 90 or 365 days.

darkslide29 said:

Article says "Non-shareable content includes songs added to iTunes Match from outside of the iTunes Store,"
If iTunes match successfully matched a CD, your family will have access to this CD. However, it seems that if the CD was not matched, and was instead manually uploaded from your comp to Match for your account, they can't access it.

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I must've tried to match one particular CD four or five times, ripping to both AAC and MP3 at various bit rates before I found one that would match every song. Weird behaviors, too, where one song wouldn't match at 256 kbps MP3 and four other songs that wouldn't match at 320 kbps AAC. Re-ripping AAC at the iTunes defaults seems to have the best luck with the CDs that I've matched so far but, man, what a PITA. More stubbornness on my part than anything really useful except, as you say, if you can't share uploaded songs with your family's iDevices.

For having been released three years ago, iTunes Match really feels like an abandoned beta. I get that they don't want people to be able to just rename any old MP3 to "match" songs they may actually not own, but IMO the current match algorithm errs far too much on the side of cautiousness.

At some point, I guess you give up and go back to separate iTunes libraries and copy MP3s back and forth?

darkslide29 said:

That's too bad, and I don't even remember how to check what was matched successfully or not. This is part of what is just supposed to work. I know I have at least a couple CD's that are in the iTunes store available for purchase, but still didn't get matched correctly, so it uploaded it. Because of this, my family can't listen to it? Smh.

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One of the columns you can add from the Playlist view in iTunes is iCloud Status, with various statuses like Matched, Uploaded, Purchased, Not Eligible, etc. that you can sort or filter on. But, you're right, it shouldn't be that hard.

rkilcoyne said:

The inability to convert an existing child's account to a child in the eyes of iCloud renders this feature useless. Especially infuriating considering their iCloud accounts were created automatically as part of the setup of their own iOS devices.

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There is a solution, whilst you can't change an account to have a DOB below 13, I have set both my children's accounts (previously adults accounts) to be 13, this allow me to have them as children accounts in my family that request app installs.

r3loaded said:

Family Sharing is largely useless if your family largely consists of adults. No, I'm not letting my brother or my mother buy stuff on my credit card (or vice versa), I'd rather they use their own cards on their own accounts. I'd just like the ability to share purchases with each other, so I can read the book my mother bought, hear the album my brother bought or they can play with the app I've bought.

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Sounds like you just want to get a lot of stuff for free. Nothing wrong with that, we all do -- but I think the purpose of this whole family thing is to merge your purchases with your immediate family vs. having to put your card in on your kids' Apple IDs. Personally I just went the route of buying apps / music through my own Apple ID and gifting them to my daughter.

r3loaded said:

Family Sharing is largely useless if your family largely consists of adults. No, I'm not letting my brother or my mother buy stuff on my credit card (or vice versa), I'd rather they use their own cards on their own accounts. I'd just like the ability to share purchases with each other, so I can read the book my mother bought, hear the album my brother bought or they can play with the app I've bought.

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You're right, but I suspect this is by design. Apple's use of the term "Family" means "immediate family members that live in the same house." So generally 2 adults and their offspring.