Play happy families with Apple’s Family Sharing

You have stuff! You have people! Let’s bring them together!

If your family is an Apple family, you’re going to love Family Sharing. It enables you to share all kinds of things with your household, and it can save you lots of money: other family members can access your app and content purchases without having to buy them again, and if you have familyfriendly Apple subscriptions to services such as Apple Music, Apple TV+ or an Apple One bundle you can share those too. Some third-party app subscriptions also support Family Sharing. Family Sharing enables you to share your purchases and subscriptions with up to five other people in your household, and each family member can authorise up to 10 devices each.

In addition to sharing content and apps, Family Sharing has some other useful features. You can set up Ask To Buy to make sure nobody buys apps or content without your approval, and you can also use Apple’s brilliant Screen Time parental controls to help keep your home harmonious and your Apple devices age-appropriate.

In this feature we’re going to use macOS Big Sur, but Family Sharing applies to Macs running OS X Lion 10.7.5 or better, iOS devices going back to the iPhone 3GS and iOS 5, and on Windows 7 or later. However, to actually set up Family Sharing you’ll need to be using macOS Yosemite/iOS 8 or later.