Friday, October 10, 2014

iOS 8 Family Sharing

Geoffrey Goetz:

In the old style of sharing an iTunes account, computers and devices could switch between different accounts every ninety days. With the new iTunes Family Share, each iCloud account can only be associated with one Family Share at a time, and can switch only twice in a calendar year.

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What makes it worth switching is the fact that the children on the account can start building up their own account with their own apps. This may not be important for any child under the age of thirteen, but will become important once your child grows up and wants to manage their own purchases. With the old style of sharing an iTunes account across multiple devices within a family, there was no way to break away from the family and start of with a library of your own apps, music, books and movies. Now there is, family members can start building up their library before moving out of the family.

Update (2014-10-24): Dave Stachowiak:

Family sharing doesn’t seem to be all it was cracked up to be. It’s not making sense to have to pay for iTunes Match multiple times or in app purchases again for different IDs in the same house.

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There's a major caveat: Family sharing does not work for in-app purchases. Since purchases have mostly moved from the App Store to in-app purchases, family sharing isn't worth much for apps.

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