How Family Sharing Should Work

Apple and Amazon are now (finally!) getting around to rolling out family sharing options for people with multiple accounts in a household.

Apple was first out of the gate, and it is unfortunately a huge disappointment with respect to content sharing. As it exists now, it’s nearly completely useless for this, and it has left me scratching my head and wondering if anyone at Apple actually has children and has tried to use it. We have yet to see what Amazon will actually come up with, but I don’t have much confidence right now that it will be what I want.

In brief summary, Family Sharing allows you to make a “family group” where some accounts are designated as parents and some as children. Parent accounts can decide if their content (music, movies, books, and apps) is shared or not, and if it is, all other family members can see that content. This is all-or-nothing — individual purchases can be hidden from family members, but only by also hiding them from yourself. All family accounts share a single credit card for purchases, and child accounts must ask for permission from one of the adults before making purchases. It also opens up several other family groups (location sharing, shared calendars and photostreams, etc…) which seem to be helpful and nice if you don’t know how to set that up yourself. My main gripe is with the way content sharing is done.

I sometimes buy things I don’t want my kids to even see in the list, for a number of reasons. Maybe it has too much sex or violence, maybe it’s something that’s boring for them, maybe it’s just not something I want them to have unfettered access to, or maybe it’s something I’ve bought as a gift and I’m not ready to give it to them yet. Regardless, the list of things I’ve purchased should not be automatically exposed to other members of the family. I have no real problem with sharing things indiscriminately with my wife, but there are still a lot of things I buy that she’s just not interested in and clutter up the list (and vice versa).

Here’s what I’d like to see:

Have a default sharing option that applies across the board if individual items aren’t overridden (shared or unshared.)
Allow the ability to share or unshare individual pieces of content on a case by case basis, with individuals or groups. Some useful classifications here would be “with other adults”, or “with kids”, or “with kids over a certain age”. But even without groups, this would still be helpful.
If you have multiple accounts, allow a choice of which one to use when purchasing content.
More importantly, allow unlimited transfers of content ownership between accounts in the same family. This would also handle the gifting situation nicely — I could buy a book for my son when it’s on sale, and then make it available to his account for some special occasion.

It has long been my recommended approach to do family sharing on Apple’s ecosystem by having a joint shared account for iTunes content, and having each family member have their own separate account for iCloud — messages, facetime, backup storage, etc… I don’t see anything currently in Family Sharing that changes that advice for the time being, and they definitely have not yet “fixed the problem”.

I’d love to hear feedback on other use cases I haven’t considered.