Family Sharing Not Inviting

Just upgraded to 8.0.2 and no help. This time, instead of sending an invite to my son, I chose the other option to have him enter his password (on my phone). He did that then…

• I was then taken to a screen that asks if my son's account is correct. It is so I hit next
• The next screen ask about location tracking, I hit track location (got to know where that kids goes 🙂 )
• And then nothing happens. No follow up screen, now success screen, no message on my son's phone - nothing.

I've never deleted my sharing account and started over, so I don't think I'm being effected by the wait 1 year problem (and if I was, shouldn't an error message pop up telling me so). Anyway, still waiting for a fix here…

As far as I know you have to invite family members by email. It might help to be sure the invitation is sent to the email address associated with his Apple ID. Also check both his spam/junk folder as well as his inbox.

You're welcome. This may be happening because so many people are setting up Family Sharing right now and the servers are overloaded. You might want to just give it some time. One point of caution is that you don't want to delete him from your account and keep trying to re-add him. There is a restriction in place that prevents someone from changing family accounts more than twice per year. If he were to be added to your family sharing account twice, then removed, he could not re-join for a full year.

I have this problems too. What's strange is when I send the invite (via my iPhone to my son's iCloud address) I'm asked to enter my Apple ID (which I do)—once I do that nothing happens—there's no feedback saying something like, "Success, your invite was sent" or similar. It almost appears that the invite is never sent which might indicate a server overload issue (as other users have mentioned above).

I'll wait…

I think I figured it out (for me at least).

I have two apple IDs (I've been through MobileMe, .Mac, and iCloud and I've wound up with two IDs - I'd love to merge them, but that is tale for another thread).

Anyway, the invitation will send just fine so long as you're logged into iCloud, the App Store and iTunes (on iPhone) with the same ID. I was logged into iCloud with my new apple ID, and iTunes and the App store with the old - that was my problem.

I've had this problem and found the invite is sent to the iCloud e-mail address which is not necessarily the same as the apple id e-mail address originally used to create it. Once I had set up the iCloud address in mail I was able to access the invite. However you can only acknowledge the invite on a device running iOS 8 or a Mac with OS X Yosemite logged into iCloud on that account. I'd therefore set up the kid's iPads fine but my wife's iPhone 4 has been a struggle as it can't upgrade from iOS 7. I had to create a new user account on my Mac for her (we've always shared a joint parent's account) and log that new account into iCloud through system preferences to accept the invite. (I ended up with two invites as I sent one to her iCloud address after the gmail invite seemed to have failed and then had to delete the extra invite when I returned to my own iCloud login). As an extra complication my Mac didn't seem to like it if two users accounts were logged into iCloud simultaneously and so I had to fully log out my wife's new user account before re-logging into iCloud on my own user account again so I could approve her as a parental member of the family (able to approve kid's purchases etc.).

Hope this solution works for you!

heatwards wrote:

I am trying to set up Family Sharing for myself and my son.

Family Sharing seems to be messed up and Apple is working to get it corrected.

I suggest you wait a few days.