Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

IMessage With a Wife?

C

carabou

macrumors newbie
Original poster
Sep 20, 2012
6
0
Hello, I have come here to hopefully answer a question i have.

My situation is i have LOTS of Apple devices, Many Macs, Many IPads, and the big problem... My phone and my wives.

I understand that Apple may want to make sure that we all have different accounts, but her and i have shared a ITunes account for nearly 5 years now. 50% of my music, 50% hers, same with contacts, movies, apps... ext.

How do I Properly set it up so when i IMessage her and the same back to me, it displays properly. Meaning, no duplicate messages.

Ideally i would like to go into IMessage settings, assign a number (or email) for each device. This would be great so i could facetime my IMac from my Macbook, or send a IMessage to my wife exclusively, not across everything. If i wanted to send it across everything, i would just add all the unique numbers/emails and send out a sort of mass IMessage.

I mentioned this above, but FaceTime is also a big problem i have yet to fix. I want to facetime her iPhone and not have all my devices light up like a xmas tree. BUT, if i wanted to FaceTime one specific device, i could just simply "call Wives IPad2 or something. A

Any ideas?
 
carabou said:
Hello, I have come here to hopefully answer a question i have.

My situation is i have LOTS of Apple devices, Many Macs, Many IPads, and the big problem... My phone and my wives.

I understand that Apple may want to make sure that we all have different accounts, but her and i have shared a ITunes account for nearly 5 years now. 50% of my music, 50% hers, same with contacts, movies, apps... ext.

How do I Properly set it up so when i IMessage her and the same back to me, it displays properly. Meaning, no duplicate messages.

Ideally i would like to go into IMessage settings, assign a number (or email) for each device. This would be great so i could facetime my IMac from my Macbook, or send a IMessage to my wife exclusively, not across everything. If i wanted to send it across everything, i would just add all the unique numbers/emails and send out a sort of mass IMessage.

I mentioned this above, but FaceTime is also a big problem i have yet to fix. I want to facetime her iPhone and not have all my devices light up like a xmas tree. BUT, if i wanted to FaceTime one specific device, i could just simply "call Wives IPad2 or something. A

Any ideas?
Click to expand...

Settings/Messages/Send & Recieve

Untick your iTunes account and add another email address. This will stop duplicate messages from showing on her iPad, and will only send them to your device. Add her own email address onto this list.

Now for Facetime go into Settings/Facetime

You'll see multiple selections for email addresses and even a number if you're on an iPhone. Untick the iTunes email address and add her own email address onto this selection too.
 
My wife and I shared an iTunes account for some time, but we discovered that she really needs her own account to make this stuff work. She uses my account for the store and we still share any purchases, but she has her own separate ID for iMessage, facetime, iCloud, find my friends, etc. This way we can still share apps, but we can communicate with each other as well. It works very well. It'll take a little work to setup at first, but it's worth it.
 
The only way is multiple Apple ID's. You should be able to apply different ID's to different parts of the phone though, keep your shared account for iTunes but add different ones for iMessage and Facetime.
 
Your wife and you can sign up for @me.com or even use gmail.com to register as Apple ID. Once you've done that just use these IDs as your personal ID seperated from the ID you shared in the Stores. iMessage and Facetime accept multiple IDs from email address.
 
WoW, Thanks! I will get this worked out when i get home after work tonight. Right now im just making her angry, as shes getting so many different messages. There is a guy that i work with named Abby, he uses imessage as well, tho ones i sent him are also going to her. I understand why now, but i just got a call from her that went something like this...


"um, why are you meeting up with a women named Abby at 5 am friday, in the big parking lot behind the mall and why is she telling you to dress warm"


"hunny, Abby is a guy i work with, and we are going to the mall Friday morning to stand in line for YOUR new IPhone"

"o"
 
carabou said:
Hello, I have come here to hopefully answer a question i have.

My situation is i have LOTS of Apple devices, Many Macs, Many IPads, and the big problem... My phone and my wives.

I understand that Apple may want to make sure that we all have different accounts, but her and i have shared a ITunes account for nearly 5 years now. 50% of my music, 50% hers, same with contacts, movies, apps... ext.

How do I Properly set it up so when i IMessage her and the same back to me, it displays properly. Meaning, no duplicate messages.

Ideally i would like to go into IMessage settings, assign a number (or email) for each device. This would be great so i could facetime my IMac from my Macbook, or send a IMessage to my wife exclusively, not across everything. If i wanted to send it across everything, i would just add all the unique numbers/emails and send out a sort of mass IMessage.

I mentioned this above, but FaceTime is also a big problem i have yet to fix. I want to facetime her iPhone and not have all my devices light up like a xmas tree. BUT, if i wanted to FaceTime one specific device, i could just simply "call Wives IPad2 or something. A

Any ideas?
Click to expand...
As someone else mentioned, have her set up her own Apple ID. My wife uses my Apple ID for iTunes app purchases, but she has her own Apple ID for use with iCloud (which consists of iMessage, calendars, contacts, reminders, etc.). Go through her phone' settings, and anywhere you see your email address, change it to the Apple ID that you set up for her (except for the settings for iTunes & App Stores, unless you no longer want to have a shared account for that).

When you change the email address (which usually involves pressing a big red button that says "delete account") the phone will prompt you over what to do with the data: remove it from the phone, or leave it on the phone. The data will still be in iCloud, so it won't affect you. You'll probably want to leave the data on her device, since her new iCloud account won't have any data on it to start with.
 
My wife and I have three AppleIDs that we use. My main one we share, so that she has access to all the apps purchased. This also allows us to use the same Photostream (this was before shared streams), Documents in the Cloud, etc. So for example, she could update our budget spreadsheet in Numbers, and I would get the changes instantly. Likewise, if I take a picture with the built-in camera, it shows up in her Photosteam instantly. We also have a shared calendar for stuff we both do.

For anything that needed to be personal, Contacts, Reminders, personal Calendars, etc, we have a personal Me.com account. This lets us keep that stuff separate, and that's how we handle iMessages. (Although iMessage is primarily going through our phone numbers.) So if she's logged onto the Mac at home, she gets her own stuff. Although, she rarely logs herself in.

So far it's worked well. We may consolidate down to just using our personal accounts if Documents can be shared like Photo Streams can. We'll see.
 
carabou, try setting Messages and Facetime to only identify the user by the phone number. Or at least don't have them share the same email/appleID in the Messages and Facetime settings.
 
I have it working perfectly now.
We share the iTunes account, and different phone numbers for phones.
I created Email accounts for each Device i own and pared them with each IDevice's iMessage & FaceTime settings.

So basically, Each device is a contact in my contacts.

It works perfectly! I can call or message any device needed for communication to family.

And I can just jump into settings and flip out one for another to use.

But i think you have to check ok on the other device you take over from that device?

ill test later, but thanks again! You guys just made my IDevice world that much better!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back