Two Apple Watches, one iCloud account, messed up draw/tap/heartbeat

[Baseline]

My wife and I both got Apple Watches, and for iCloud Photo Library reasons, both of our phones use the same iCloud account. Our ability to send each other taps/drawings/heartbeats is completely messed up, likely because of the shared iCloud account.

Namely, I'll send something to my wife, and nothing will end up on her watch. She'll send something to me, and it ends up getting sent to her own watch. Our friend will send something to me, it ends up on hers, or sometimes mine, or sometimes both.

Anyone else seeing this, or have possible solutions? And no, using separate iCloud accounts won't work, as a shared Photo Library is much more important that sending drawings.

 

[nicho]

Do you share the same icloud account for everything? If a friend sends you an imessage does it show up on her phone?

I think you may have to set up a new icloud account for one of you, to use for imessage (and facetime? i'm not sure if they can be separate apple ids) only, to fix this. It shouldn't affect your primary icloud account, and therefore icloud photo library.

 

[JSB1540]

My wife and I both got Apple Watches, and for iCloud Photo Library reasons, both of our phones use the same iCloud account. Our ability to send each other taps/drawings/heartbeats is completely messed up, likely because of the shared iCloud account.

Namely, I'll send something to my wife, and nothing will end up on her watch. She'll send something to me, and it ends up getting sent to her own watch. Our friend will send something to me, it ends up on hers, or sometimes mine, or sometimes both.

Anyone else seeing this, or have possible solutions? And no, using separate iCloud accounts won't work, as a shared Photo Library is much more important that sending drawings.

I don't really have an answer, but laughed when I thought "I hope he doesn't have a mistress sending him love taps"

 

[Baseline]

Do you share the same icloud account for everything? If a friend sends you an imessage does it show up on her phone?

I think you may have to set up a new icloud account for one of you, to use for imessage (and facetime? i'm not sure if they can be separate apple ids) only, to fix this. It shouldn't affect your primary icloud account, and therefore icloud photo library.

No, we use separate Apple IDs for iMessage.

I did some more research, and if you look at step 5 here https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT204505, it confirms that all the digital touch stuff is tied to your Apple ID, not your iMessage account.

And I confirmed that the Apple ID listed when you go to General -> Apple ID in the Watch app on your phone is the Apple ID of your main iCloud account, not your iMessage account.

So basically, I'm screwed for now. Digital Touch is strictly tied to your iCloud Apple ID, and that's that.

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I don't really have an answer, but laughed when I thought "I hope he doesn't have a mistress sending him love taps"

Ha, no, but a friend of ours was sending me a bunch of stuff to test things out today, and we found out it was buzzing my wife's wrist the whole time and bothering her, at a time where she couldn't respond and tell us to cut it out

 

[chrise2]

My wife and I are in the same boat. She can send me digital touch messages, but I get an error when I try to send to her. We share an Apple ID as well. iMessage is setup so that she only sends/receives from her phone number and I send / receive from my number. I'll probably contact Apple about it at some point. Seems like something that needs to be fixed with a software update though. Setting up a new Apple ID for my wife is not an option. That is a pita of epic proportions.

 

[Baseline]

My wife and I are in the same boat. She can send me digital touch messages, but I get an error when I try to send to her. We share an Apple ID as well. iMessage is setup so that she only sends/receives from her phone number and I send / receive from my number. I'll probably contact Apple about it at some point. Seems like something that needs to be fixed with a software update though. Setting up a new Apple ID for my wife is not an option. That is a pita of epic proportions.

We originally had the same iMessage setup. We were both using the same Apple ID for iMessage, but different numbers. To test, I went and changed iMessage on her phone to use a new Apple ID. That didn't help. Sadly, the digital touch stuff is tied to your iCloud account, and isn't connected to iMessage at all.

 

[Skeeter.USA]

People with Shared Apple ID ... Beware!

I bought three watches, one for myself and one for each of my two kids (19 & 20). We have shared our Apple ID for the last 10+ years so when we got our watches on launch day we were very excited to play with them. However, like you said, we could not communicate with each other without sending duplicates to everyone and mix up messages/sketches & taps. After A LOT of messing with our settings we realized that all three of us were going to have to set up our own Apple ID within our family plan. After each one of us set up our own account everything sent smoothly, including all of our messages, taps and drawings. The only thing that really messed us up was synching our contacts and calendars, but we have now fixed that as well. This is just one more way Apple wants to have everyone have there own account without specifically telling you, fortunately we still fit into the family plan settings.

 

[mynameisjosh]

I had this same issue with my husband and I. Went to the Apple Store earlier today to have them help us fix it. What it came down to was creating a new Apple ID for him, and then having him sign out of iCloud from his iPhone, and then I sent an invitation to his new Apple ID email address through the Family Sharing feature in iCloud. He accepted the invitation and set up his new Apple ID on his iPhone, and then paired/synced his Apple Watch again. That fixed it!

 

[Baseline]

I had this same issue with my husband and I. Went to the Apple Store earlier today to have them help us fix it. What it came down to was creating a new Apple ID for him, and then having him sign out of iCloud from his iPhone, and then I sent an invitation to his new Apple ID email address through the Family Sharing feature in iCloud. He accepted the invitation and set up his new Apple ID on his iPhone, and then paired/synced his Apple Watch again. That fixed it!

But as soon as you do that, you lose automatic syncing of iCloud Photo Library. Or are you saying that after you paired/synced the Watch, he was able to switch back to the original Apple ID and get photo syncing?

Photo syncing is 1000x more important to me than digital touch, so any solution that kills that is a no go for me.

 

[mynameisjosh]

But as soon as you do that, you lose automatic syncing of iCloud Photo Library. Or are you saying that after you paired/synced the Watch, he was able to switch back to the original Apple ID and get photo syncing?

Photo syncing is 1000x more important to me than digital touch, so any solution that kills that is a no go for me.

Photo syncing is still there because we're on the same "family" of iCloud accounts.

 

[Baseline]

Photo syncing is still there because we're on the same "family" of iCloud accounts.

Ok, I'll try that. _Everything_ I've read says that storage and photo syncing (outside of a single Family album) are not shared by the family plan. What you're saying is contrary to that But I like what you're saying, so we'll see what happens!

 

[newagemac]

I can't believe people are still sharing iCloud accounts. They were never meant to be shared and every year there will likely be more things added that cause you issues because it's based on the idea that each person has their own account.

You can share photos with shared albums. There is one already set up for you when you turn on family sharing.

 

[Baseline]

You can share photos with shared albums. There is one already set up for you when you turn on family sharing.

And that requires manually adding every single photo into the album, whenever you take a picture. We want a single family library, automatically synced between all our computers/iPads/iPhones, that doesn't require manual intervention.

 

[Baseline]

Photo syncing is still there because we're on the same "family" of iCloud accounts.

I just tried it, and photo syncing is _not_ there. There's the Family album, into which you can manually add photos and have them synced, but that's vastly different from having the entire photo library automatically synced, which is the primary reason we share a main iCloud account.

 

[macgeek01]

I can't believe people are still sharing iCloud accounts. They were never meant to be shared and every year there will likely be more things added that cause you issues because it's based on the idea that each person has their own account.

You can share photos with shared albums. There is one already set up for you when you turn on family sharing.

People do this to share their iCloud storage for backups which isn't possible with family sharing because Apple is apparently not making enough money as it is. This is a duplicate thread that has already been discussed.

 

[newagemac]

People do this to share their iCloud storage for backups which isn't possible with family sharing because Apple is apparently not making enough money as it is. This is a duplicate thread that has already been discussed.

That doesn't make sense. Why would you share 5GB among multiple people meaning each person has way less than 5GB available? If you had your own iCloud account each person gets a full 5GB of storage. By sharing the storage you're actually making it worse.

 

[Baseline]

That doesn't make sense. Why would you share 5GB among multiple people meaning each person has way less than 5GB available? If you had your own iCloud account each person gets a full 5GB of storage. By sharing the storage you're actually making it worse.

I believe the point is that if you're paying for more iCloud storage, you'd want to be able to share that on a family plan, but you can't. If you only have a 5GB plan, then you're right, sharing doesn't make much sense. But I have a 500GB plan with 300GB of pictures and videos shared in Photos, I don't want to lose that. And I don't want to pay for a second 500GB plan and try to manually share everything.

 

[newagemac]

And that requires manually adding every single photo into the album, whenever you take a picture. We want a single family library, automatically synced between all our computers/iPads/iPhones, that doesn't require manual intervention.

I don't know about you but I don't want every screenshot my wife takes or every picture of my daughter's dolls she takes ending up on my iPhone. And I might take 50 shots of one scene to get a good one but other people in my family don't want their phone filling up with the other 40 or so blurry, useless shots.

And sometimes my wife and I might take pictures that are inappropriate for the children to see. Just because I thought she looked sexy in her nightgown I got for Valentine's Day and took a picture of her doesn't mean that I want that picture to immediately show up on my children's devices.


In my family, we all take pictures and we choose to share the best ones to the family album. It makes the album WAY more meaningful than every little screenshot and tons of bad pictures all cluttering up the important pictures and the good shots.

Albums are meant to be curated which makes them more shareable. Just because a picture was taken doesn't mean it should be shared.

But hey, to each his own. Some people like for the picture they took of their ass to better see that mosquito bite from last night to immediately show up on their daughter's phone.

 

[Baseline]

I don't know about you but I don't want every screenshot my wife takes or every picture of my daughter's dolls she takes ending up on my iPhone. And I might take 50 shots of one scene to get a good one but other people in my family don't want their phone filling up with the other 40 or so blurry, useless shots.

And sometimes my wife and I might take pictures that are inappropriate for the children to see. Just because I thought she looked sexy in her nightgown I got for Valentine's Day and took a picture of her doesn't mean that I want that picture to immediately show up on my children's devices.


In my family, we all take pictures and we choose to share the best ones to the family album. It makes the album WAY more meaningful than every little screenshot and tons of bad pictures all cluttering up the important pictures and the good shots.

Albums are meant to be curated which makes them more shareable. Just because a picture was taken doesn't mean it should be shared.

But hey, to each his own. Some people like for the picture they took of their ass to better see that mosquito bite from last night to immediately show up on their daughter's phone.

It's almost like we're different people who do things differently!

 

[newagemac]

I believe the point is that if you're paying for more iCloud storage, you'd want to be able to share that on a family plan, but you can't. If you only have a 5GB plan, then you're right, sharing doesn't make much sense. But I have a 500GB plan with 300GB of pictures and videos shared in Photos, I don't want to lose that. And I don't want to pay for a second 500GB plan and try to manually share everything.

Ok I understand that. Great point. Apple really should do something about that.

 

[bmodi]

As @Baseline mentioned, the main idea of the icloud photo library - which has been introduced NOW, more or less together with the apple watch - is to have 1 foto library synched on all devices.

Within my familiy we use 1 apple ID exactly because of this reason. And it makes sense if you want to have it in that way.

And now with the Apple Watch we face problems in having the same apple ID....


I my opinion this is clearly an issue which Apple has to address for the future.....

 

[chrise2]

I'm hoping this gets changed or resolved in an update. However, from the looks of it, it would require a significant overhaul of the underlying functionality. To me, this isn't worth making an AppleID for my wife and messing up our photos and such.

 

[Sethp]

I used to work for Apple Care I heard about a few of cases where cheaters got found out because of iCloud account mixing led to iMessage mishaps