Lifetime plan with active Family Sharing Subscription plan cause a warning

I have a warning of two subscriptions. This is indeed the case, however, it is caused by I purchased the Lifetime plan and one of my family sharing group member purchased a subscription plan. I would appreciate to either:

  • allow the lifetime license can also be shared (which is the best)
  • allow the warning be explicitly dismissed

Oh that’s annoying!

I really want the Lifetime plan to support Family Sharing, but it’s not currently possible :disappointed:

I originally created the Lifetime option using the App Store’s “non-recurring subscriptions” feature, which made perfect sense at the time. But then Apple eventually gave up on that feature, and have since semi-deprecated it. Which means they didn’t add the ability to turn on Family Sharing for non-recurring subscription products :expressionless:

I want to try somehow creating a new Lifetime purchase option, that uses the same approach I’ve used in my other apps and that does support Family Sharing. But that will be no help to people who have already purchased Lifetime, so that would create an unfair situation that I don’t have a good solution for yet.

Possibly I could get around it by providing gift codes to existing Lifetime subscribers, that can be used to “purchase” the new item for free. Though I’m not sure if that’s actually possible. Anyway, hopefully I’ll figure something out.

Yeah that makes sense. I’ll add it to the todos, and hopefully get into the next release or soon after. I’ll also bump up the todo for investigating how to fix the whole “Lifetime can’t use Family Sharing” issue too.

Edovia, maker of a VNC client I use, fell into this lifetime purchase and family sharing issue. They found a workaround where owners of their individual lifetime in-app purchase could purchase a free family sharing lifetime product to allow for family sharing. Here is their blog post about it:

https://blog.edovia.com/index.php/2023/12/14/screens-5-now-supports-family-sharing/

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Oh interesting! Thanks!

I wonder how they’re doing it. I suspect they’ve created a free one-time-purchase product, and ensured that it’s only shown to and purchasable by people who already have a Lifetime product.

Though that’s the part that worries me - making sure that it’s definitely not possible to “purchase” it any other way. Otherwise it would create a potential exploit that gives free lifetime use of the app to people who haven’t paid. That would be a disaster. I’ll have to do some careful reading of docs and make sure there’s no loopholes.