Strategies to Help You Split Up an Apple ID Among Family Members

Your Apple ID is central to your Apple life. Aside from serving as your ID across services and stores, you can also use it as a tool to recover your access to your Apple devices or erase them if they’re lost or stolen.

If you’re one of the countless others who set up an Apple ID for the family, shared it with your spouse, and extended it to your kids, you’re probably getting each other’s email and messages. Thankfully, you can out of this horrible mess by splitting up your Apple ID among your family members. You’ll be glad to know that the process of migrating from a single Apple ID account to individual accounts is incredibly easy.

Strategies to Split Up an Apple ID Among Family Members

Non-Apple Email Addresses Must Be Migrated to Their Own Apple IDS

Do you have email addresses that don’t end in mac.com, me, icloud.com, or me.com? If you’ve added these non-Apple addresses to your main Apple ID account to serve as “rescue” or “reachable at” addresses, you should migrate them to a new Apple ID. These addresses won’t be moved after you migrate them to their own Apple IDs.

Enable Family Sharing

The process of enabling Family Sharing won’t cost you anything. It allows your group of accounts to access and share apps and media across the accounts. Although you can use it to pool total storage among the members of your family and give everyone the option to share purchases, it also keeps each member’s storage private.

This is an effective way to ensure that nobody in your family is going to lose access to items you use or purchase. However, it’s important to note that this is only possible if the same family members are in the Family Sharing group and if the group remains intact. Unlike developers, many apps out there don’t allow shared in-app subscriptions and purchases.

Creation of New Apple IDs

Another way to effectively split up the main Apple ID account is to create new Apple IDs for family members who don’t have third-party email addresses. This includes your kids even if you’ve already created aliases for them in the main Apple ID.