Free trial offer prevents accessing Apple One Family subscriptions?

Question

Free trial offer prevents accessing Apple One Family subscriptions?

My wife is part of my Apple One Family and has access to Apple Music and Apple TV on her phone as well as iCloud storage. She just bought a new Mac Mini and signed in with her Apple ID. It correctly recognizes that she has access to the cloud storage (and all the data is there and correct), and also correctly shows that I have shared the family subscriptions with her and with that Apple ID, but when she signs into either Music or TV she is prompted to start her free trial and cannot otherwise access the family shared accounts. Is this because, having just bought a new device with its included free offers, there is some kind of glitch preventing access to the established accounts? I can’t seem to get around this. Yes I’ve tried all the solutions shared on various threads including:

updated the OS

signed in and out, multiple times

rebooted

I actually accepted and then cancelled the TV prescription (but it’s still active for another week). I can access Apple TV that way, and I can now see the shared libraries, but when I click on a title in a family member’s library, I just get a black start screen and it won’t stream (the regular Apple TV titles will play)

Help!

She can still access music and tv on her iPhone

Mac mini (M4)

Posted on Aug 8, 2025 5:11 AM

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Answer 1

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psychotoddler Author

Level 1

8 points

Aug 24, 2025 10:55 AM in response to psychotoddler

Since no one answered this I will update it with the resolution. After going around in circles with apple support for 90 minutes I finally figured out how to solve it. I had to remove my wife from family sharing altogether. Then I could manually add her back, and she got a notification with the option to participate or not.

I did this from her end, using the option to “stop using family sharing” (a red link in the family sharing in system settings) but I suppose it could have been done from the family organizer as well (can’t guarantee since nothing about this process has made sense).

I will say that removing her from the plan immediately reduced her cloud data to 5 gb (she had 82 gb in my cloud) and it was not immediately obvious how to get this back, even AFTER inviting her back to family sharing. It turned out there was another option buried deep within the iCloud menu on her device that let her opt to use family sharing for cloud, but you have to get past a gauntlet of high cost cloud data upgrade offers first. This should be much more seamless for a company that justifies its high prices on the premise of “it just works.”

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