In-App purchases are not shareable with Family Sharing in iOS

Written on November 20, 2018

In-App purchases not shareable photo

Well, that stinks. Tonight I found out that In-App purchases are not shareable in iOS’ Family Sharing feature.

My wife has a last generation iPad Pro that she uses to make paper goods and catch up on shows and movies on Netflix. When she isn’t using it, I thought I could set up some apps to do some focused writing.

One app that I’ve recently started using more of is Working Copy, which lets me work with various projects that are versioned with Git. Working Copy is free to download but to unlock the ability to push, requires a $15.99 in-app purchase, which I gladly paid on my personal iTunes account.

On my wife’s iPad, she’s got her own iTunes account which is linked to my account via the Family Sharing feature. We’ve used this feature before to download apps that I purchased with my account to her iOS devices. But according to Apple, in-app purchases aren’t one of the things that gets shared.

Prior to Working Copy, if I was on an iPad, I’d just set up SSH access to my desktop on my local wi-fi. But being able to have a working copy of my site’s source that I can tweak and change offline has been nice for mobility purposes and not having to set up so many things to get this setup working.

Guess I’ll just have to pair my bluetooth keyboard to my iPhone and do some writing there for now.

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