Please help us resolve our iPhone identity confusion

Actually, no I would imagine most do not share an AppleID, at least not for iCloud, iMessage and FaceTime. When you share one AppleID for those three services, you share a single account for those services. Since contacts and other settings are sync'd via iCloud, there will inevitably be collisions of information. Not to mention that only one of your phone numbers can be associated with iMessage, so whomever was the latest to sign in to iMessage will be the only one with their phone number registered with the iMessage account.

You can share an AppleID for App, iTunes and iBook store purchases if you wish, although family sharing is recommended (Set up Family Sharing - Apple Support). But for iMessage, FaceTime and iCloud, you really should not be sharing an AppleID - there will always be conflicts and issues if you continue to do so.

So the fix is simple. One of you needs to get a new AppleID, sign out of iCloud, iMessage and FaceTime with the current AppleID. Then sign back in with the new, unique AppleID. That will resolve all of the issues you mention in your first post.

Alan Bruce Ammerman wrote:

Thanks for responding, but "the fix" you mention is not a fix, because it means that my wife and I will no longer be automatically uploading all of our photos to the same iCloud Photos collection, as we now do. Do most couples/families have separate, individual, iCloud Photos collections? Separate iCloud accounts for backups? Sounds cumbersome, duplicative, and unnecessarily expensive. Or am I missing something simple here?

While you may not like it, but yes, that is indeed the fix. Apple has designed iCloud, iMessage and FaceTime to all work as individual accounts tied to a single AppleID. There will inherently be issues with multiple people sharing a single AppleID for those services.

So, to answer your questions, yes indeed, most people have their own private AppleID for all those services. They can then use family sharing and other sharing options for things like Photo albums or libraries to share access to content with those they wish, while keeping other aspects of those same services separate and private.

For iMessage, only a single iPhone telephone number can be associated with an account, so it is imperative for everyone to use their own AppleID if they wish to use their phone number for iMessaging. Similarly for FaceTime, unless everyone actually wants their phone to ring every time any one of you gets a FaceTime call.

With iCloud, if sharing an AppleID, you also are then forcing everyone to have the same contacts, calendars, notes, iCloud keychain passwords (if you use that), safari bookmarks and settings, see everyone's documents, see everyone's emails and correspondence, etc. There is no privacy, nor any ability to maintain order to contacts and such unless everyone has their own account, which means their own AppleID. You also may inherently have to purchase extra storage for everyone's "stuff", whereas the free 5GB of space may well have been sufficient for each individual user if they just had their own separate account.

As far as expensive goes, FaceTime and iMessage are free, as is iCloud for the basic 5GB account space. Upto 50GB is available for $0.99/month, so hardly expensive unless you have hundreds of gigabytes of photo's. And since iCloud backups occur automatically in the background when the device is charging, how is it cumbersome? Everyone simply turns on backup for their account, and would restore their devices from their account. Its not at all duplicative as each device needs to be a separate backup file anyway.

What you're missing is that iCloud accounts are not meant to be shared between people - that's Apple's own advice. They are meant to be shared across devices owned by the same person. If you're only doing it for photos, use iCloud photo sharing.

Unfortunately, what you're doing is directly contradictory to how Apple intended iCloud accounts to be used.

Among everyone I know, each individual has their own account and separate libraries for photos, backup, etc. It's easy enough to share specific photos. Lord knows I don't want to see all of the photos my wife took at her quilting retreat... she'll probably make me sit through all of them anyway.