Family Sharing makes it easy for up to six people in your family to share each other’s iTunes, iBooks, and App Store purchases without sharing accounts. Pay for family purchases with the same credit card and approve kids’ spending right from a parent’s device. Share photos, a family calendar, and more to help keep everyone connected. And with an Apple Music family membership, up to six people can get full access to Apple Music, too.
Create your Family Sharing group, invite members to join, and enjoy each other’s digital company. Go to iCloud settings on your iOS device or Mac and tap Set Up Family Sharing to get started.
Organizer
Parent/Guardian
Age 14
Age 10
Age 6
To get started, one adult in your household — the organizer — invites up to five additional family members and agrees to pay for any iTunes, iBooks, and App Store purchases they initiate while part of the family group. Once family members join, the features of Family Sharing are set up on everyone’s devices automatically.
Everything’s better when shared, and sharing has never been easier. Once you’ve set up Family Sharing, all the songs, albums, movies, TV shows, books, and apps ever purchased by family members are immediately available to everyone else in the group. And, of course, so are new purchases. The content appears automatically in the Purchased tab in iTunes, iBooks, or the App Store for each family member. Just select the family member whose collection you’d like to browse, then download or play the content you choose. Other family members can access your collection in the same way. If you want to keep some purchases private, you can choose to hide individual items.
With an Apple Music family membership, up to six people in your family can enjoy unlimited access to Apple Music on their devices. Everyone gets full, individual access to the Apple Music library, expert recommendations, on-demand radio stations, and Beats 1 — our free, worldwide, 24/7 radio station. It’s the whole world of music for the whole family. 1
All new iTunes, iBooks, and App Store purchases initiated by family members will be billed to the organizer’s account. But the organizer can still call the shots. Just turn on Ask to Buy for children in the family. When a child initiates a purchase, an alert is sent to the organizer, who can review the download and approve or decline it right from the organizer’s device. This applies to both purchases and free downloads.
Before your children can make a purchase, they must ask your permission.
A notification appears on your device. You can review the request, then approve or decline it.
Now collecting and sharing family memories is easier and more fun. When Family Sharing is turned on, a shared album is set up automatically in the Photos app on all family members’ devices. Then everyone can add photos, videos, and comments to the album and be notified when something new is added.
Family Sharing creates a family calendar where everyone can view, add, or change events and appointments, and they can also get an alert when something changes. And anyone can use the Reminders app to send time or location reminders to the family. So when it’s picture day, pizza night, or just a trip to the beach, everyone’s in the know.
When you join a Family Sharing group, you can start sharing your location with the rest of the family automatically. If you’re running late to a restaurant or need to know if your kid made it to band practice, just use Find My Friends or the Messages app to keep tabs on each other. If you need privacy, you can temporarily stop sharing your location by turning off Share My Location in iCloud settings.
Finding your family’s lost devices is easier when everyone can help. With Family Sharing and Find My iPhone, any family member can help locate another member’s missing device. Their devices appear in a single list in the Find My iPhone app. So it’s easier than ever to track down a misplaced or stolen iPhone, iPad, or Mac.
Kids under 13 can have their own Apple IDs. As a parent or legal guardian, the organizer creates the child’s Apple ID and adds the child to the family group. Ask to Buy is turned on by default, and the organizer can also limit the content kids have access to on their devices through Restrictions on an iOS device or parental controls in OS X and iTunes.