Apple is making a big change to Family Sharing with iOS 26.4: Once the update hits, you’ll be able to use your own payment method in Family Sharing groups that have Purchase Sharing turned on. This might sound small, but it’s a significant change to how Apple handles payments in these situations.
Payment Sharing no longer exclusively goes through the family organizer
Payment Sharing can be a convenient way for Family Sharing groups to take advantage of shared plans and content. That could include subscriptions, like Apple One, Apple Music, Apple TV, or Apple News+; purchased music from iTunes; movies and TV shows from the Apple TV app; books from Apple Books; or apps bought on the App Store. It means anyone within the family can access these items, but it also traditionally came with a limitation: With Purchase Sharing turned on, you couldn’t buy your own shared things. All purchases went through the payment method set up by the organizer of the family group, unless you happened to have an account balance from a gift card or allowance.
This makes a lot of sense when the family members are children, but not as much when those family members are adults. Not all Family Sharing groups are necessarily “families,” either: Friends can pool their accounts together to take advantage of shared services like iCloud plans. When all shared purchases go through one person’s credit card, it’s a bit of a pain.
That’s what iOS 26.4 is changing. Once you update, you can choose to put new shared purchases on your own card—assuming you are an adult. (Minors still need to go through the family organizer’s payment method.) If you want to sign the group up for Apple Fitness+, you can pay for it; if you want to buy a movie on the Apple TV app that others can watch too, that can come from your card. It’s a long overdue update to the system that will make Family Sharing groups a bit easier to use for adults.
What do you think so far?
What else is new with iOS 26.4
Apple has a number of new features and changes coming with iOS 26.4. In addition to this Family Sharing update, Apple Music gets a visual overhaul, plus you can now generate playlists with AI. There are eight new emojis rolling out here, following the Unicode 17 standard, plus Apple finally fixed iOS 26’s buggy keyboard.
While iOS 26.4 is still technically in beta testing, Apple rolled out the Release Candidate this week. Barring any major bugs, this is the version of iOS 26.4 that will launch to the public, and we’ll likely see it sometime next week.
