Wife and I each have our own iPhones and we are planning to set up a third, hand me down 5s as a “home” phone for those times our kiddos are home alone as we have no landline. Obviously need it to make and receive calls and texts and run on wi-fi.
Anyone done this? Is the best practice to set up a child Apple ID under my account or is it possible to have 2 iPhones with different phone numbers under one Apple ID? The kid(s) will probably have their own phones within a couple years so maybe their own Apple ID is the way to go?
I assume you are still planning to have a SIM card in the phone thus your kids can dial out on the cell network? If not you may face some difficulties if they can only use Facetime/Skype etc to dial out.
For example if the home phone is set up on your Apple ID you won’t be able to use Facetime to call it when you’re out, and it will ring whenever someone calls you.
I’d suggest setting it up as a separate phone number.
You can use your own apple ID, but that would mess up facetime and deliver messages and calls to both your phones.
A different apple ID I think would be the best option.
I concur that if the goal is to have a fully functioning phone that remains at home (similar to a land line) the phone should have its own number.
FaceTime and Messages can be configured differently on each device even if the devices are signed into the same Apple ID. You just need to set up the apps so they use the phone’s number instead of the email address(es) associated with the AppleID.
I do this with my personal and work phones; they both use the same AppleID but the work iPhone only receives calls/messages sent to and initiates new conversations from that phone’s number.
Taking a different tack to the desire for a home phone line. Depending on the costs associated with adding a new line to the OP’s cellular plan, an option that may be cheaper would be to set up a basic VOIP service. There would be up front hardware costs but the monthly service might be less than that of the additional cellular line.