2 thoughts on “iCloud account sharing”

1. The photo sharing I can see Apple implementing the way he describes. But the collaborative Document sharing… not so much. Security issues aside, it sort of goes against the whole “i” thing. Would be nice, though.

2. I posted this on the linked site as well, but add it here in case anyone is interested in how I’ve kind of being doing what the author is asking:

   Note that there is a sort of ugly way to do what you ask already (with limitations on OSX). If you want to share BOTH Photostream as well as “Documents in iCloud”, the solution is to have one person’s iCloud account be the main iCloud account for all devices. You can then add secondary iCloud accounts (the main one is added through “iCloud” in settings, secondary ones are added through the “Mail, Contacts, Calendar” settings). Once you have two iCloud accounts on your device, you can choose which items sync with which iCloud account. i.e. if you and your wife want to share your calendar and / or contacts, then both use the main account. Only the main account can sync photostream and documents, but the secondary account can sync everything else.

   This all works perfectly if you are only on iOS devices. However, the problem comes with OSX which is not as flexible. On OSX, the secondary account can only share Mail / Notes, Calendar / Reminders, & Contacts, and note that Calendar and Reminders are lumped together on OSX (but not iOS).

   I’ve been doing this for a while in our family, and it is really nice being able to see pictures my wife takes on my iPad, and vice-versa.

   The big limitations for me are all on the OSX side. Since OSX won’t allow secondary accounts to share bookmarks, my wife doesn’t get iCloud synching with her bookmarks on any of her devices. Also, I would like to share our calendars but not our reminders (although I did work around that with a feature I discovered yesterday … you can share selective calendars between iCloud accounts so we now have separate calendars that are shared between us).

   Its also possible that having all devices sync documents to the same iCloud account could cause problems in the future. For example, if a game uses iCloud to save its state, both people would probably not be able to play at the same time as they would load / save each others save games.

   One other limitation is that if you use iCloud to backup your devices, you will only get a free 5GB for everyone since all devices backup to the same iCloud account.

   There may be other limitations as well, but we’ve been doing this since iOS5 came out and haven’t found them yet.