Locked out of Family Sharing for 364 days

My wife and I are in the same dilemma and I'm posting here in hopes that Apple will see the many people having this problem and will come up with a solution. When I called this morning about being locked out of family sharing they had no idea what I what talking but at least they were very nice about it and did everything they could to find a solution. Apparently engineering is looking in to it. I think there really should have been a better warning about not being able to sign up for family sharing more than twice a year which I think is a pretty ridiculous rule to begin with. I'm hoping Apple will at least wipe everyone's slate clean if they don't want to remove that rule.

It happened to me. I called 1-800-MY-PHONE and asked to speak to a senior advisor. After 2h, I managed to re-include my wife.

Yeah, I am on the same boat with my son. He has been locked for 364 days.

I did talk with two different people at Apple and one had no clue and the other called the supervisor. Randall. Nice guy but his final say was that Apple was working on a solution and he would hope the next iOS update would fix this issue.

So not much success.

This problem is very weird and I see no reason why calling Apple they could not reset it. I guess this is just a bug they did not expect. So no matter who do you talk there now it won't help.

I Posted earlier today about the great experience with Apple support in dealing with this issue and that Jesus, the support person said expect it to take 2-4 days but he would get my wife's Apple ID reset. To my surprise, Jesus just called me back and itold me it was already taken care of! I just finished setting up the sharing with my wife and everything is working perfectly, including the sharing of apps.

anyo e reading this thread most likely has already been locked out, but here is a helpful hint for once you get that fixed. If you set up sharing and some things don't appear to be shared (I.e. apps) try signing out of the Apple id account and signing back in. That should then solve the problem.

again, I was very impressed with the professionalism and care from support.

sjthone,

I totally understand your issue cause I have the same issue. Locking out the the account own is the dumpiest thing I have even seen from Apple since they got rid of iDisk which is now back as iCloud Drive. I called Apple and they have hundreds of users with this issue and are working on a solution.

Based on the last few posts I tried again. My family share worked. or more accurately, I was able to add my wife. That was half the battle though family share did not actually show our respective purchases on the others' phone . But then we each downloaded a free app (saw that tip on other boards) and we are up! So my recommendation: try again now. They seem to have fixed the issue.

Thebow,

Thanks for the update they have removed the lock out. Now its time to setup the rest of my family with iCloud accounts now.😐

Yep, Apple finally removed the lock. I was able to put my son in. Good job Apple fixing this quickly. 🙂

YEs, they fixed our issue too.

I Had this same issue. I logged out of my itunes&app store account and logged back in and it fixed the issue. Apple may have put in a fix or some how logging out of your itunes&app store account resets the timer. Obviously I would not expect this to work but it worked for me.

Apple now have a fix. I spent some time on the phone with them yesterday and just got an email saying it's fixed. The 365 day limit still applies but at least my family sharing works.

Apple have fixed the issue. Ask and you shall receive!

This happened to me and my husband immediately after we upgraded. I started a family share with my account, not realizing he already had (that's 1), and then had to delete it so I could join his (and 2). Then, it didn't work. (I've since discovered in other forums that if you go to the app store and "purchase" a free app, it magically works.) Because it didn't work, my husband deleted his share and I left it (that's one for him). He then started a new one, and I couldn't join, and I'm kicked out for 364 days. We have yet to share any purchases or even have access to them through each other's accounts.

After much time on the phone with support, they then told me that we could put my account in "troubleshooting mode" and I would have to change my password to something they gave me "so that their engineers could look into it." I haven't heard back and that was this afternoon... I am now terrified because someone I don't know (or someones?) has access to my account, so I'm planning to change my password again because I don't like this.

In the meantime, if they do not fix this, I'm getting an Amazon phone ASAP. I don't have time to sit on hold all day just because I made one tiny mistake.

DITTO... I was told that they would get back to me after it was passed on to engineers.