You can now share Google Play apps, games, movies, TV shows, and books with five family members

Google Play now fully supports families, after having launched a family plan for its music streaming service last December. Here's how it works. First off, a note: you can't share music, since Google would obviously like you to use that aforementioned $14.99 per month family plan for Play Music All Access. Everything else in the Play universe is fair game, though.

This means you can share apps and games (on Android only, for obvious reasons), movies, TV shows, and books with up to five family members. For free, of course. So no more duplicate purchases made by you and your significant other, and no more lending your device(s) to your kids to play a game you've bought.

One account is a 'family manager', and up to five others are members. To make purchases, one credit card is used, and that has to belong to the manager. Members have to be in the same country as the manager, and you can only be a member of one family group at a time (switching is permitted once per year).

For now, the supported countries are Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Japan, the UK, and the US. Hopefully that list will expand soon. Once you're in a family group, everything you buy will become available to all members, but previously purchased stuff isn't shareable unfortunately.

And one final caveat: to set up a family group you need to use the Play Music app for Android. That and only that. For whatever reason, you can't (yet?) do this from a computer or an iOS device, even if Play apps are available on Apple's mobile products. After the group is created, you can manage it in a browser.

Source | Via