Apple’s Family Sharing Simplifies Sharing Purchases & Managing Kid Capabilities

Family life is all about togetherness, but trying to keep track of who’s doing what when can be tough. Apple’s Family Sharing service makes it super easy to share apps, media, and more within a family of up to six members, and it provides a few helpful digital housekeeping capabilities such as locating your kid’s misplaced iPad. How can Family Sharing enhance your family's everyday life both online and in the real world? Here's an overview:

Manage Your Kids’ Purchases

Every Family Sharing group will have an organizer. That person (maybe you) sets up the family on a Mac in System Preferences > iCloud and connects a credit card to the account to pay for all App Store, iTunes Store, and iBooks Store purchases of apps, music, TV shows, videos, and ebooks.

For any child under the age of 18 in the group, you can turn on "Ask to Buy". This feature lets your kid shop for apps or media, but will only complete a purchase if you approve it. Ask to Buy also applies to free downloads so you can maintain control over free games. You can also give other adults in your family the ability to approve Ask to Buy requests.

Share Apps, Media, and More

To help you keep costs down, once someone in the family has purchased an app or media file, anyone else in the family can download it. No duplicating purchases! However, some apps don’t allow such sharing and in-app purchases can’t be shared. You can hide some or all purchases from other family members. 

You can also buy a family subscription to Apple Music, Apple’s streaming music service. At $14.99 per month for a family instead of $9.99 per person, it’s a good deal. Our family loves this!

Plus, family Sharing creates a few items that all group members can access on their Apple devices:

• A shared Family album appears in the Photos app, making it easy to build a common set of photos. You can designate the Family album as a screensaver on your Mac or Apple TV.
• A shared Family calendar in the Calendar app helps track those basketball games and piano recitals that everyone needs to know about.
• A shared Family list in the Reminders app has many possible uses, such as a grocery list with location-based alerts or a chore list with timed alerts.

Find Your Children (and Their Devices)

Family Sharing simplifies the setup and usage of two key Apple services related to finding things.

All family members automatically become “friends” in Apple’s Find My Friends app. This bundled app shows where everyone is on a map (more specifically, it shows where their primary device is). If you need privacy briefly, you can temporarily stop sharing your location. 

You won’t need the Find My iPhone app—which shows the location of all your family’s Apple devices, including the tiny AirPods—on a daily basis. But when your tween isn’t sure whether he left his iPhone on the bus or in his locker, it’s a godsend. You can also use Find My iPhone to play a sound on a missing device (in case it’s in the couch), put a message on it, or even erase the device entirely if it lost or stolen.

Family Sharing may not do everything you’d want, like share entire Photos libraries or contact lists, but do you really want that anyway? It is a fantastic tool for families whose members use a variety of Apple devices.

Make Life Easier: Reminder Lists w/ Siri

"Hey Siri, add Chardonnay to my grocery list."  Try it! And If you don't have a "Grocery List ", Siri will ask you if you'd like her to create one. Do it! 

There's a couple different ways to use reminders with the iPhone. Lets discuss. If you tell Siri to randomly remind of of something, those reminders are automatically added to your default list. You can find this in Settings > Reminders > Default List. That is generally used for thing like —“Hey Siri, remind me to fill the dog's water bowl at 10pm tonight” — which is awesome, but not as good when you want to maintain different shopping lists.

For instance, like I mentioned above, you can create a list called “Grocery,” and then you can tell Siri, “Put chocolate-covered bacon on my Grocery list.” Want to be even more organized? Make a list called “House Projects” (you can do this manually OR just say "Hey Siri, make a reminder list called "House Projects") and then tell Siri, “Add blue paint to my House Projects list, and remind me when I arrive at Home Depot.” She will not only do it, she will also verify which Home Depot works best for you first! Then you’ll receive an alert reminding you to buy blue paint when you pull into the parking lot. To look at any list via Siri, just say something like "Hey Siri,"... “show my House Projects list” or "show my Grocery List". You can make any Reminder List(s) you want!

Let the technology in your hand help you! It is really great when you're busy cooking and realize you need more butter but your hands are dirty and you can summons Siri to add it to your grocery list. Or better yet, when you are relaxing and suddenly remember something you need but do not want to get up...or forget later...or especially when you're driving.

You can also share these lists with others, for instance, when I add something to the grocery list, my husband knows to check the list we share when he is at the store and vice versa. Try it out, don't be scared to use Siri, she gets better at communicating with you the more you communicate with her (or him).

Call 911 or Emergency SOS with an iPhone or Apple Watch.

And while we are discussing this - please go to your Health App and complete your Medical ID card! Medical Professionals and first-responders are starting to use it.

Lets say you needed to call emergency services from your or someone else’s iPhone? These kind of calls take place at stressful times, it can be hard to remember what to do. For example, if you’ve been in an accident, it might be difficult to think or impossible to navigate the iPhone if you can even find it. In iOS 10.2 and watchOS 3 and later, Apple added the Emergency SOS feature to help. 

What does it do and how do I use it?

Emergency SOS does three very important things:

• First, it calls emergency services, using whatever number is appropriate for your location, which could be particularly helpful when you’re traveling abroad.
• After your emergency call ends, Emergency SOS sends a text message with your location to emergency contacts that you’ve set up previously in the Health app.
• Finally, it displays your Medical ID for first responders so they can be aware of things like medication allergies. You create your Medical ID in the Health app as well.

How you invoke Emergency SOS varies slightly depending on which Apple device you have:

• On the iPhone 8, iPhone 8 Plus, and iPhone X, press and hold the side button and either of the Volume buttons until the Emergency SOS slider appears. Either drag the Emergency SOS slider to call emergency services right away, or just keep holding the side and Volume buttons. If you continue holding the buttons down, a countdown begins and an alert sounds; at the end of the countdown, the iPhone automatically places the call, a feature that Apple calls Auto Call.
   
• On the iPhone 7 and earlier, rapidly press the side button five times to bring up the Emergency SOS slider. Drag the slider to call emergency services. (The quintuple-click can work on the new iPhones too; it’s an option in Settings > Emergency SOS.)
   
• The Apple Watch acts like the newer iPhones. Press and hold the side button to bring up the Emergency SOS slider, or keep holding the side button to start a countdown after which the Apple Watch will call emergency services automatically via Auto Call. The Apple Watch must be connected to your iPhone, be on a known Wi-Fi network and have Wi-Fi Calling enabled, or be an Apple Watch Series 3 with a cellular plan.

You can test this in a non-emergency situation, without actually placing the call. On both the iPhone and the Apple Watch, there will be a red hangup button you can tap, followed by an End Call or Stop Calling button. Similarly, you can cancel notifications of your emergency contacts.

You’ll also want to stop calls if they’re placed accidentally—I have personally and accidentally activated this once and after cancelling the call, 911 immediately called me back to make sure I didn't need help. It was slightly embarrassing but also very reassuring and cool to know that it worked!

To add emergency contacts—the people who you’d want notified if you were in an accident, for instance—follow these steps on your iPhone:

1. Open the Health app, and tap the Medical ID button at the lower right.
2. Tap Edit, and then scroll down to Emergency Contacts.
3. Tap the green + button to add a contact.
4. Select the desired person, and when prompted, pick their relationship to you.
5. Tap Done to save your changes.

A couple things. First, if you’re concerned about activating the Auto Call feature inadvertently, you can turn it off in Settings > Emergency SOS on the iPhone, and for the Apple Watch in the Watch app, in My Watch > General > Emergency SOS. 

Second, bringing up the screen with the Emergency SOS slider also automatically disables Touch ID and Face ID, such that you must enter your passcode to re-enable them. 

Clearly, lets hope that you never have to use Emergency SOS, but if you do, it is a fast and  effective way of contacting emergency services that everyone should know about.