I'm about to upgrade my iCloud storage. Is there a way to share this with my family without adding my iCloud to their devices? With the new family feature? They can share all my apps, and that works well, but I want to share my cloud storage with them. I've looked on Apple's website, just wanted to see if I was missing something.
As a developer I have a little bit of info that may sort of help with this.
Storage is tied to a particular AppleID, which is also an "iCloud" account. To access that data you must be signed into that AppleID. This applies to what all apps use and iCloud Drive.
As a side effect of this you also share mail, contacts, calendars and photos.
So, if you are okay with sharing: mail, contacts, calendars and photos... with the caveat below about app storage... then yup, you could probably share the storage by using the same AppleID for all devices/users.
The caveat mentioned above is that some applications do not necessarily distinguish between "users" (or files perhaps) when syncing with iCloud. iCloud accounts are more or less meant to be used with a single user. This means that for developers we don't have to take any special consideration to how we write data to iCloud's storage areas for sync purposes.
With 1Password 5 we're now using CloudKit. It's sort of a database in the cloud. We do not distinguish between users in this case (it would be weird if we did actually) and so it becomes a bit of an issue in that if you have 2 people syncing to iCloud you'll share data in 1Password.
I hope that helps answer your questions a little. I wouldn't suggest it, but at 99 cents a month for something like 20 gigabytes I think it's relatively inexpensive to bump everyone's storage up a bit. With the old iCloud plans I'd totally have agreed that sharing would be great, but there's no built in mechanism to share storage across iCloud accounts and you'll likely run into a variety of issues with applications that sync to iCloud that won't work with multiple users.
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I haven't setup Family Sharing myself, but according to Apple's website it does.
http://support.apple.com/kb/ht201079
I think that is for payment purposes, not for sharing the storage itself.
When you are part of a family sharing "team" (is that what we should call it?) then the payments of all products and services go through the same credit card and the primary on the family sharing side of things pays the costs... that means if you had two people and one upgraded their iCloud storage it'll mean that one account has the upgrade, however, the second person will have to buy it as well for that account (two charges) but it will be paid for by the family sharing "account"
