My wife and I have three kids, two of which have their own devices. My wife purchased an Apple Watch this weekend. After talking to Apple support, I moved our account to a family sharing account. While the tech told me there would’t be any downside to this, I am not convinced he’s ever converted to a family sharing account.
Most of the problems I’ve worked out. The one lingering one is that all of our Apple iTunes credits are on one ID. if any of the other family sharing ID’s purchase anything, it won’t use these credits and will hit our card instead. Has anyone else dealt with this? Is there any way around this?
With family sharing, the entire family shares the same payment method.
iTunes credits can be held independently by individual family members and can only be spent/used by that individual.
A purchase made by a family member will draw on their account credits (if they have any) first, then the shared payment method when the credits are exhausted.
Credits are not shared, and so when you organized your family, the credits remained on whichever account held them originally.
I do not believe that you can transfer credits between family members (or any two individuals) and credits cannot be held collectively by a family (only individual members of that family).
I don’t think there is a way around your current situation: the account with credit will make purcahses against that credit until it’s gone. Meanwhile, the other accounts will make purchases against the shared payment method unless they add credits to their own accounts using the payment method of their choice.
I don’t know the reason you have a preference for using iTunes credits and not a conventional payment method, but moving forward if the intent is to avoid having individual purchases hit the shared payment method, individuals will either need to load up their own iTunes credits on their own accounts (which can easily be done in the App Store), or use the shared payment method for purchases. They will use their credits before hitting the shared card.
If the intent is to control spending, then I suggest you use the Allowance feature that Family Sharing offers.
It’s worth noting (and I point this out simply because a lot of people seem to miss it) that purchases (NOT in-app purchases and NOT subscriptions) are shared between family members. If there’s a $9.99 app/book/movie/TV season/song that one family member purchases, the other members can download that item without purchasing it again. In your case, then, one $9.99 purchase allows all four of you to use the app, rather than having to buy it four times.
I was worried that everything you wrote was exactly correct. I did some research as I started hitting snags and I came away with the same take as you have. I was hoping someone smarter than me had figured a way out of it.
I keep the credits because I can often find iTunes gift cards on sale (sometimes substantially).
I also discovered (and I write this for a future person searching MPU for family sharing information) that an app I bought (which had in game purchase) is giving me a lot of trouble. Nether the app nore the in app purchases are opening on the other accounts. I understand about the in app purchases not transferring, but I’m annoyed I can’t get the game to open. I’ve emailed the developer and have gotten no response.
This is truly odd. I can’t say I’ve ever had this experience, and I don’t know for sure whether this would be attributable to family sharing, but sure sounds frustrating either way!
Just one of the downsides of going to Family Sharing. It has been pretty great otherwise for my family, but realizing this part of it was definitely a bummer.
My wife makes very few purchases through iTunes or the App Store, so if she does want something she just shoots me a text with a link and then I buy it with the account credits. If she were more active with purchases we would just load her account up with iTunes cards too.