The missing link — Apple Family Essentials

During the ongoing #FamilyAdminDays I stumbled over the setup of an Apple Family account. And stumble onwards I did. Creating a family account appears to be way more complicated as, for comparison, creating a managed Apple ID in Apple Business Manager (ABM) or Apple School Manager (ASM), or Apple Business Essentials (ABE. Now, isn’t that becoming a feast for all acronym-addicts?). Not even mentioning that the capabilities are woefully limited.

If you never had the opportunity to use the aforementioned tools, but are limited to what Apple is offering for managing a family, you’re missing quite a lot. So much so, that I do wonder why Apple — or anybody else — doesn’t actually offer something like ABE, tailored for families.

That would include something akin to the Apple School/Business manager for families’ devices — Macs, iPhones, iPads and so on — and the ability to create Apple ID’s for the lot. Moreover, assign family-owned devices to the members, locking or wiping them as necessary. Admittedly, you can do that now, but only separately for each Apple-ID. What you definitely can not do with the current family setup is deploying software, which is a shame, and managing updates — something I’d love to have, just to keep my parent’s devices up to date.

For the time being, Apple does have two systems running in parallel, one for Schools & Business, one for the Family. The former got, with Apple Business Essentials, a rather simple solution for up to 500 devices; while having device management and user management front and center. The latter is for just a handful of users, each having their devices tied to an individual Apple-ID.

Is the recent advent of tying a custom email domain to an iCloud+ subscription a hint that Apple might work at something similar to Business Essentials for families? Wish I could answer that. For the immediate future, probably not. But then, considering the comments on the ABE beta test, this has a lot of weird limitations at the moment. Like, let’s just pick one at random, the download of free apps from the apps store isn’t possible, all apps have to be purchased from ABE. Or a maximum of three devices per user. Maybe ABE is indeed the beta version of an upcoming Apple Family Essentials (I should try to trademark that name, regardless), only time will tell. But I really, really would love to have the extended capabilities of an MDM at hand, and not the peculiar and limited family accounts.