Oliver Haslam·

App Store Subscriptions Now Support Family Sharing But Developers Have To Opt In

Apple has enabled Family Sharing for subscriptions for the first time, as noted by a few developers on social media last night.

The feature means that anyone who shares an app via Family Sharing can now also share the in-app subscription. So long as developers opt in, of course.

The new feature can be seen in the Subscriptions area of the App Store settings, with users able to switch the sharing on or off as they wish. However, developers will first need to enable family sharing themselves which allows them to prevent subscriptions from being shared if they prefer.

That could be useful for subscriptions that have a large cost associated with them – flight tracking, for example, requires costly data per user and allowing a subscription to be shared could be crippling for a developer.

The ability to share subscriptions was announced alongside macOS Big Sur, iOS 14, and iPadOS 14 back in June during the WWDC event. It’s taken a long time for the feature to go live, but it’s thought that it came into effect when Apple also brought the App Store Small Business Program online last night, too.

So far the number of developers who have enabled subscription sharing appears to be very low indeed, but with the feature having only gone live hours ago we’re hopeful that will change.

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