Can there be more than one apple id on a device?

I can see where only 1 Apple ID should be linked to a phone or an iPod, but requiring a unique COMPUTER for each person in the family is NOT acceptable. NO more iTunes purchases for our family. It honestly doesn't impact me that much because I have avoided iTunes purchases because I didn't trust their draconian DRM policies.

You may have only one Apple ID associated with a given device. You cannot associate a device with more than one Apple ID at a time. iDevices are not multi-user.

iTunes- Setting up Home Sharing on your computer

Setting up Home Sharing for Apple TV (2nd and 3rd generation)

Hi!

We're about to embark on a similar situation as you - I'm curious to know if your solution worked? Thank you!

I'm afraid the penny has dropped. Apple obfuscates and complicates just like every other computer company, and sometimes worse. In backing up my computer and preparing for to have my hard drive replaced per Apple's recall, I decided to move my media files from the shared folder on my computer to an external drive to clear up some space. Until I did this, home sharing meant that I could in fact share music and apps with family members. When this no longer worked after the migration, I discovered that Apple is getting increasingly "better" at limiting access to songs purchased on different AppleIDs. Family members can't download songs they've purchased onto my computer which is associated with my Apple ID even within their own user account; apps which used to show up for all user accounts no longer do. I was already annoyed that Apple will only let three Apple IDs access their Cloud on one computer (I have three kids and one doesn't have access to the family calendar.) And having had some of the kids apps' on my phone for their use at times, you can no longer update them without going to settings and logging in/out for the different updates. But seeing how they've managed to block access trying to share a single library from an external harddrive, it is only a matter of time before you won't be allowed the convenience of sharing on your portable devices either. Most of my music has been burned from CDs, at least that is still sharable. One ID will work with up to five devices, but only one ID will work per device.

Frankly I no longer know why I was willing to pay a premium to purchase Apple products.

I think Apple is really behind the ball on this one.

many families pass down their old phones to their kids instead of buying an iPod. I'm wondering if I should set the girls up with their own ID, but this also means they can't share music/apps, right? According to the info, home sharing is done via one Apple ID only.

So another option is to set up a Mac ID/login on my iMac (and latpop presumably) for each of my three kdis, and configure iTunes and whatever. (how many hours do you think I want to waste on this?!). And then it gets more complicated: the kids have a windows pc also, but at this stage I've been syncing their phones on my iMac. I want to shift them to be more independant. But it pains me to even go near windows7.

So, is the better solution to set up one Apple ID for the 3 girls to share, and any music/apps they buy I don't get to share? (probably not a big deal 80% of the time)

of course this will lead to another problem in a few years... when they are teens and ready to have separate (digital) lives, how to split all the music/apps?

I have just recently bought a macbook and gave my old PC to my sister and her family. Her oldest has an iPhone and 2nd oldest has an iTouch. They both have their own apple ID's, naturally. Today I was setting up my old PC to work out best for their family so I made an account on the PC for each person in the family.

I set up the oldest's iTunes account and downloaded all purchased music. Then I logged out of her profile and got onto the 2nd oldest's profile. I signed her onto her iTunes account and tried to download her purchased music but iTunes prompted me with an error saying if I downloaded past purchases from a 2nd apple ID, the other apple ID would be locked out from downloads for 90 days.

All i want to do is have both my nieces be able to manage their apple purchases seperately without forcing my sister to buy a computer for each child. There must be a way. I am honestly surprised it didn't recognize I was on a separate profile trying to use the 2nd apple ID. For now only the oldest is allowed to have her music on the computer, it isn't fair to them. Any help will be greatly appreciated.

McNeezie I think you need to create multiple libraries within iTunes. I came across this yesterday and it worked for us.

http://www.imore.com/how-use-multiple-apple-ids-one-computer-and-itunes

An option for some people looking for mac based sharing is setting up a Mac server. If you have a capable device and connection it could aid many people's search for a file sharing system. Although iPhones/pods are minimized as part of this setup for those with iPads,Mac/books a server setup could solve many headaches and issues

Mac Server is over my head. Lucky my Family includes 5 people so we should be the perfect candidate for Home Sharing. Up until today parents have separate Apple IDs, One child has a third Apple ID and the other two kids share an Apple ID.

I was at an Apple store today and a rep promoted Homesharing. I think it makes sense. One question I forgot to ask is what about the legacy music, apps & movies purchased to date, I guess no way to merge in the new FamilyShare ID? Thx.

So if i have an ipad with the serial number registered to my apple id noone else can register it with their apple id? Im an apple newbie, just got mine. Someone could email me diamond93@hotmail.ca would be greaaatly appreciate it!

I will share with you what I have done to manage this with my family. While the solution isn't without flawes, it seems to do the trick. First, you need to have one person who is managing the synching of everyone's devices. In my family, I have three iphones, about to be four, and five ipads. We all synch to the same apple ID to allow one another to take seemless advantage of our Itunes, which is on our Imac. To synch individual music or video interests, we simply select which playlists we want and manually synch that way. A couple of us use imatch and the cloud to make the entire library accessable as well. With respect to the imessage, mail, contacts, etc. we each have a gmail account for our individual emails, contacts etc. So for instance, my forth grade daughter has a gmail account that we choose to synch her contacts, calendar, etc to and then that is also the account where she receives her imessages from on her ipad and itouch. My son, who has an iphone and ipad, does the same thing, but under settings, he goes to imessage and checks his phone number and his email as his preferred way to receive imessages and texts. My wife and I do the same thing. To avoid having everyone see one anothers contracts etc, we only synch contacts from our individual email accounts. Here is the downfall to this: When you update your phone or add a new device, apple always wants to reset everyone's facetime and imessage settings and then low and behold we are all receiving imessages from one another's friends etc. To work around this, I simply take each of their devices and go to their imessage settings and only check the email and phone numbers relative to their devices. I dont' know is this is the best solution, but it seems to work for us.