HOW TO SHARE APPS, VIDEOS, GAMES, AND MORE WITH YOUR FAMILY ON ANDROID

Are you looking for a way to share the Android apps you bought on your Google account with your wife? Maybe you’d like to open up some of your movie library to your kids, or gift a

book you enjoyed to your brother? Well, we’ve got good news and bad news. Let’s deal with the bad first.

Android improves with every passing year, but sadly, it still lacks an easy way to share content between family members. If you buy an app, a book, or a movie, and you want to make it available to everyone in the family, your options are pretty limited. As it stands right now, there’s no way to share content across different Google accounts. You can’t share or gift content from your own library.

The good news is that Google is gearing up to launch Family Library, which will allow six family members to share purchased apps and other content starting in July. We’ll update this family sharing guide with all the details just as soon as we try it out. In the meantime, you have a couple of options.

Create a family group

It seems that Google quietly introduced a family group option into Android last year. It was initially created to enable you to purchase a family subscription to Play Music, Google’s unlimited music streaming service, but it can be used to share a family payment method for the purchase of apps, books, music, movies, games, TV shows, and magazines.

When you create a family group, you become the family manager, and you can invite up to five other family members to join via an email. The family manager must be at least 18 years-old, members must be at least 13 years-old, everyone needs their own Google account, and it’s only available in supported countries. Here’s the Google support page with more details.

Unfortunately, there are a couple of major drawbacks. All you’re really sharing is a central payment method. Each individual can buy content with the same credit card, but it’s only accessible via their Google account. So, if you buy a movie on your Galaxy S7, it won’t be available on your wife’s HTC 10.

You can limit in-app purchases for family members, so that the family manager has to authorize them, but you can’t limit content purchases. That means everyone in the family group can buy as many games, apps, or movies as they like using the family credit card.

The Play Music Family Plan is the most compelling reason to set up a family group. It gives six people access to unlimited streaming music, simultaneously, on up to 10 devices for $15 per month.

It’s worth noting that you don’t have to subscribe to the Play Music Family Plan in order to set up a family group. If you want to set up a family group, here’s what to do:

1. Open the Play Music app.
2. There might be a card at the top that mentions the family plan.
3. If there’s no card, tap the three horizontal lines at the top left to open the menu.
4. Look for a Subscribe option or tap Settings > Subscribe/Start trial.
5. Tap Other plans > Family and you’ll be prompted to set up a family group.
6. You need to choose the family payment method.
7. You’ll be prompted to invite family members using their Google account email, or you can choose to skip this step and invite people later.
8. The final step is to purchase the Play Music Family Plan, but you don’t have to. You can quit it and the family group will still exist.

You now have a family group set up. You can access it via the Play Store app menu under Account > Family. You have the option to invite and remove members and decide whether they should need approval for in-app purchases.

All members can use the family payment method to buy content and the family manager can see a list of all purchases. It’s also worth noting that members can choose to use an alternative payment method, if there’s something they want to buy without using the family payment method.

It’s debatable how useful this family group option is right now, but it looks as though Google is still laying the foundations for something grander.

Share a Google account

Your other option, if you really want to share content, is to share a Google account. Most parents already probably do this with young kids if they have their own tablets. It means logging into the same Google account on all family devices. That way, all the content you buy will show up on every device. Unfortunately, it also means that everything else will be shared, including contacts and messages.

Technically, you could set up a Google account expressly for the purpose of sharing content. You can add additional Google accounts to your Android device via Settings > Accounts > Add account. There doesn’t seem to be a hard limit to the number of devices you can log into the same Google account from. However, this is definitely against Google’s terms of service, so we don’t recommend it.

We’re hoping the new Family Library feature will solve this issue once and for all, bringing real family sharing capabilities to Android. We’ll keep you posted.