[sgustard]

I live in a fully Mac/iOS household, and I had no idea until I saw this article that Apple Music was a thing that competes with Spotify. That's probably due to iTunes and iCloud being such a confusing mess that I just don't use Apple services and I haven't launched those apps in years.

[hellweaver666]

It is indeed a mess. After sharing an iCloud account for years my wife and I decided to upgrade our Apple Music to a family account so we could have separate music (and listen to music on different devices at the same time). Apple decided this must mean we also want separate iCloud accounts and upon logging into her own Apple Music account, also proceeded to remove our 15 years of family photos and a couple of years of shared notes from her device. Now she can't see the photos I've taken or any of her old photos unless we use the sharing functionality (we take a lot of photos of our kids and having them auto sync on both devices was brilliant for us). We tried doing it the manual way but it was such a pain.

Since Apple music's family service wasn't compatible with how we use our devices, we cancelled Apple Music and got a family account on Spotify instead. When Apple Music expired it wiped all the playlists we had in iTunes including ones I created years before Apple Music was ever a thing and not even containing any music from Apple Music.

I'm thinking of also dumping iCloud, but I really like the automatic backing up of all our photos to all of our devices. Heck, at this point I would switch to Android as well if it weren't for the years of apps I've purchased for Apple and don't want to buy again.

[Angostura]

If you share an iCloud account, you're going to find things painful, its really not the way that things are designed to work.

Here's how to get back to where you were, if you want to use separate iCloud accounts.

1. On your device create create a Shared photo album. 2. Share it with your wife using her new iCloud ID 3. Select the photos that you wan to share (basically all of them initially) 4. Tap Share > iCloud Photo Sharing 5. Select the shared album.

From then on, you and your wife share all photos you want to share to to that Album.

Same thing works with shared Calendars, Notes, To-do list etc.

If you share an iCloud account across multiple people you will find yourself fighting the system all the time

[josteink]

> proceeded to remove ... can't see the photos ... When Apple Music expired it wiped all the playlists ...

Adding my own experiences with iTunes-wiped devices and music-collections...

The only consistent thing with Apple and music/services is them accidentally wiping or deleting your data from both your devices and their services.

Applied this consistently, it's clearly a design decision.

What kind of company designs things to behave this way? Really?

[sah2ed]

> Applied this consistently, it's clearly a design decision.

Perhaps the design decision assumes the separation is due to a divorce? In that case, keeping them separate is a reasonable decision since neither party would want to be forced to endure further shared memories on any device.

[harryf]

Likewise. The UI is a disaster for any pre-Apple-music iTunes users so I try to go there as rarely as possible. And after years of deleting half my music every time I switch phone or device (intentionally? https://www.rollingstone.com/music/news/lawsuit-apple-delete... ) I doubt I will ever trust Apple with anything music-related again.