Family Sharing—a feature of iOS 8 that lets family members share their iTunes and App Store purchases—is a terrific benefit to a household full of iPhone users. It makes it easier—and cheaper! With Family Sharing, you only have to pay for everything once—to share content you enjoy with your family and to let them do the same.
But that doesn't mean you'll want to use Family Sharing forever.
In fact, you may decide that you want to turn Family Sharing off completely. In order to be able to turn Family Sharing off, though, you need to be the Organizer, the person who set up the sharing for your family originally. If you're not the Organizer, you won't be able to turn the feature off; you'll need to ask the Organizer to do that.
But if you are the Organizer and want to turn off Family Sharing, here's what you need to do:
- Tap the Settings app
- Scroll down to the iCloud menu and tap it
- Tap the Family menu
- Tap your name
- Tap the Stop Family Sharing button.
With that, Family Sharing is turned off and no one in your family will be able to share their content until you turn it back on (or a new Organizer steps in and sets up a Family Share).
What Happens to Shared Content?
If Family Sharing was once on and has now been turned off, what happens to the items that everyone in your family shared with each other? The answer has two parts, depending on where the content came from originally.
Content Purchased at the iTunes & App Stores
Anything purchased at the iTunes Store or App Store is protected by Digital Rights Management (DRM).
DRM restricts the ways in which you can use and share your content (generally to prevent authorized copying or piracy), which means that anything shared via Family Sharing stops working. That includes content someone else has gotten from you and anything that you got from them.
Just because that content can't be used anymore, though, doesn't mean it's deleted. In fact, it all stays listed on your device, you just need to re-purchase it yourself. If you've made any in-app purchases in apps that you no longer have access to, you haven't lost those purchases. Simply download or purchase the app they're from again and you can restore the purchases at no additional cost.
When You Can't Stop Family Sharing
Stopping Family Sharing usually is pretty straight forward, but there's one scenario in which you can't simply turn it off: if you have a child under 13 as part of your Family Sharing group. Apple doesn't allow you to remove a child that young from a Family Sharing group the same way you'd remove other users.
If you're stuck in this situation, though, there may be a way out. This article explains how to remove a child under 13 from Family Sharing.
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