Family Sharing
Save money by sharing your storage and services
You can also share Apple services and your iCloud package with family members. Family Sharing enables you to share all kinds of things with up to five other Apple IDs so that you can share photos, storage and apps. If you’re thinking ‘hang on, aren’t Apple IDs unavailable to under-13s?’, you’re right, but Apple enables you to create Apple IDs on their behalf.
You can choose to share iCloud storage, Apple TV+, Apple Arcade, Apple Music, location data, iTunes and App Store purchases and Apple Books. Family Sharing also enables you to set up Screen Time and parental controls. Depending on third-party apps you have, you may find them here too. For example, a Tweetbot app subscription can be shared with family members.
You can only share services that you have a subscription to: if you don’t subscribe to Apple Arcade or Apple Music, you can’t share a subscription you don’t have (although you can share iTunes purchases or iCloud Music Library). To share Apple Music, you’ll need to have an Apple Music family membership or a family or premier Apple One membership.
Safer sharing with family
When you set up Family Sharing it will use the same payment method for all your family, so if you don’t want the rest of the family to run up big bills on in-app purchases or paid apps, ensure that Ask To Buy is enabled. Ask To Buy sends you a notification when a family member attempts to buy an app or media from Apple, and you can choose whether to approve or deny each request. Ask To Buy is switched on automatically when you create a child account, but you should check it in Settings > Your Name > Family Sharing (iOS) or System Preferences > Family Sharing (Mac) for any family member aged 13 or older.
Unless you’ve applied parental controls in Screen Time, apps or media you’ve bought for yourself can be accessed by other family members. If you’ve been bingeing on gory horror movies and don’t want to share them, you can either disable purchase sharing for specific people in the Family Sharing settings page or set Content & Privacy Restrictions in Settings > System Preferences > Screen Time.