Apple confirms that Family Sharing for in-app purchases is now live

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Gold iPad Pro with an iPhone SE
Gold iPad Pro with an iPhone SE (Image credit: iMore)

What you need to know

  • After making an appearance last night, Apple just confirmed that Family Sharing for in-app purchases is now good to go.

After it appeared last night, Apple has today confirmed that Family Sharing for in-app purchases is now available.

The change was announced via the Apple developer portal and provides a link for devs who want to learn more about the feature.

You can now enable Family Sharing for auto-renewable subscriptions and non-consumable in-app purchases, allowing users to share their purchases with up to five family members. Family Sharing provides a streamlined, convenient user experience and can help you attract subscribers, encourage paid subscriptions, increase user engagement, and improve retention. Sales and Trends reports will be updated soon to help you understand the performance of family subscriptions.

Clicking through takes developers to a guide that explains how to enable Family Sharing for their apps, as well as a little more information on what the change actually means. It also points out that developers will need to use enhanced receipt validation and App Store Server Notifiations.

Apps that offer auto-renewable subscriptions and non-consumable in-app purchases can enable Family Sharing, which will allow customers to share their purchase with up to five additional family members. You can choose which of your in-app purchases to allow Family Sharing for in App Store Connect. To ensure family members have access to your in-app purchase content, you'll need to use enhanced receipt validation and App Store Server Notifications.

Good to know! Developers can now enable the feature if they wish, although not all will do so likely depending on how their apps function and whether they will incur any per-user fees for things like weather or flight data.

Oliver Haslam
Oliver Haslam
Contributor

Oliver Haslam has written about Apple and the wider technology business for more than a decade with bylines on How-To Geek, PC Mag, iDownloadBlog, and many more. He has also been published in print for Macworld, including cover stories. At iMore, Oliver is involved in daily news coverage and, not being short of opinions, has been known to 'explain' those thoughts in more detail, too. Having grown up using PCs and spending far too much money on graphics card and flashy RAM, Oliver switched to the Mac with a G5 iMac and hasn't looked back. Since then he's seen the growth of the smartphone world, backed by iPhone, and new product categories come and go. Current expertise includes iOS, macOS, streaming services, and pretty much anything that has a battery or plugs into a wall. Oliver also covers mobile gaming for iMore, with Apple Arcade a particular focus. He's been gaming since the Atari 2600 days and still struggles to comprehend the fact he can play console quality titles on his pocket computer.