How to share apps

steinooo · 11 Jun 2013 at 10:54

Hi all,

I have an iTunes account which has an app I bought listed, and I want to share it with my wife, who has an iPhone.

How do I do it please?

lamboman · 11 Jun 2013 at 11:19

You'd have to use your App Store account for her phone. To be honest I see little reason not to, you end up sharing apps and not having to buy them twice!

steinooo · 11 Jun 2013 at 11:39

how does that work? how do I get my app store account on her phone?

Feek · 11 Jun 2013 at 11:43

Settings, iTunes & App Stores and you can sign in there.

That's how I do it in my household. We all have our own iCloud accounts but we all use the same iTunes account, that way any purchases can be used on all devices with no additional cost.

steinooo · 11 Jun 2013 at 12:42

brilliant stuff, thanks lads! I'll give that a go tonight :-)

Adnams Drinker · 11 Jun 2013 at 22:20

lamboman said:
You'd have to use your App Store account for her phone. To be honest I see little reason not to, you end up sharing apps and not having to buy them twice!

Feek said:
Settings, iTunes & App Stores and you can sign in there.

That's how I do it in my household. We all have our own iCloud accounts but we all use the same iTunes account, that way any purchases can be used on all devices with no additional cost.

So if I buy an app on my iPhone on my iTunes account, my missus can install any apps I've bought without having to buy another copy if she assigns my iTunes account to her iPhone? That's great from our point of view, but almost feels a bit like ripping off the app developers, buying once and installing on two phones ...

Apologies if I've grabbed the wrong end of the stick - still a bit new to some of the finer points of this iPhone-owning lark

Vertigo · 11 Jun 2013 at 22:26

If you want to use separate accounts then just temporarily sign in using the "other" account then you can download and install the app. Once this is done you can sign back into the original iTunes account and the app will still work, you'll just need to do the same thing again to update it in the future.

Morfik · 11 Jun 2013 at 22:44

Yes you can do it, there's no way Apple can tell if you just have two iPhones or not. You can even have her log back into her own App Store account after and she'll keep your apps. She'll need your login to update them though.

Feek · 11 Jun 2013 at 22:45

Vertigo1 said:
If you want to use separate accounts then just temporarily sign in using the "other" account then you can download and install the app. Once this is done you can sign back into the original iTunes account and the app will still work, you'll just need to do the same thing again to update it in the future.

Why bother?

Vertigo · 11 Jun 2013 at 23:12

I don't know, people might want to - just saying you can

tribz · 11 Jun 2013 at 23:33

Feek said:
Why bother?

I can see one reason, keeping iMessage separate. I share an account and sometimes get the other persons messages and vice versa when we fluff up the settings.

tribz · 11 Jun 2013 at 23:35

Morfik said:
Yes you can do it, there's no way Apple can tell if you just have two iPhones or not. You can even have her log back into her own App Store account after and she'll keep your apps. She'll need your login to update them though.

They can actually tell via the devices UDID. They don't mind though, I think it's ok to install on up to 5 devices in the household.

Feek · 12 Jun 2013 at 07:50

tribz said:
I can see one reason, keeping iMessage separate. I share an account and sometimes get the other persons messages and vice versa when we fluff up the settings.

That's why you sign into your own individual iCloud account. You can be logged into iCloud with one account and iTunes/Appstore with another (shared) account. It works perfectly and we have four devices in this house all doing that.

tribz · 12 Jun 2013 at 09:07

Interesting, thanks.