How To: Share iPhone applications between multiple iPhones
By Will Park on Friday, July 25th, 2008 at 11:39 PM PST In Announcements, Apple, Applications, iPhone, iPhone OS
Let’s say you and your family decided to jump on Apple (NSDQ: AAPL)’s bandwagon and now you’re all geared up with Apple hardware. Now you’re all getting along with all your Macs and iPhones doing their thing, like one big happy family. It’s all fun and games around the house. All fun and games, that is, until you actually want to have some fun with iPhone games.
Apple will gladly take your money as you purchase multiple copies of Super Monkey Ball or Texas Hold ‘Em Poker for each member of your family. It can get expensive buying multiple copies of the same software for every member of your family. And, Apple would love the business.
But, if you’re a bit more iTunes savvy, like Melvin Rivera, you’ll be sharing a single iPhone application purchase throughout the household (or among friends, just don’t tell Apple, shhh!). Melvin has put together a handy little tutorial to get all your iPhone applications and games shared on multiple iPhones.
You see, the Fairplay DRM that Apple uses to protect its iPhone applications from piracy allows you to authorize up to five computers to share your iTunes purchases. So, you should be able to share that single copy of Super Monkey Ball with up to four other people. Here’s a quick rundown of Melvin’s tutorial:
- Use your computer’s iTunes account to buy whatever iPhone application you want (we’re going to use Super Monkey Ball for demonstration purposes)
- Download the application to iTunes and sync to your iPhone or iPhone 3G
- Get to your family member’s, or friend’s, computer and log in to their iTunes application with your credentials
- Log out and back in
- Find Super Monkey Ball and click “Buy”
- Re-download Super Monkey Ball
- Log out of your iTunes account
- Log back in with your family member’s iTunes account
- Sync the iPhone
That’s it! You should now have Super Monkey Ball on two different iPhones.
Head on over to allforces.com to get the full, pictorial-aided tutorial on how to share iPhone applications with multiple iPhones.
[Via: allforces]
thanks for the tip.
Thanks for the great post, been scowering the web for solutions to help me copy between iphones and Kosta IPhone is awesome. Digg it.
Am I missing something? I’m getting ” was not installed on the iPhone because you are not authorized for it on this computer.” Has anyone experience this?
Vin, check to make sure you didn’t de-authorize the computer, or you may need to log in again. You could also try syncing the 2nd iphone while you’re still logged in with the account that made the purchase.
Also, try buying a song and authorizing the two computers to play it. If they can both play the song, then they’re both authorized to the same account and should also be able to sync the app to an iPhone. Trying the song is just a simpler test since you can play it in iTunes without syncing to a device.
Good luck!
TO VIN
hope you solved already.
Anyhow, it’a matter of itunes account. Probably your credit card has expired or something like this.
Update the account and it will work !
I encountered the same issue as Vin. Which account should I try with purchasing a song? Is it the account that was used to purchase the games?
How do I make sure that I didn’t de-authorize the computer?
Thanks.
I mean: it won’t delete the apps that are on their iPhone already, but not on my account, will it?
Did you guys figure out how to transfer apps downloaded to the account that did not purchase without getting the problem of it not being authorized for the account. Any help would be appreciated as I have the apps in the iTunes library of the phone I want to sync, but it’s not the account that originally purchased the apps. It says that it’s sync’ing but then it doesn’t actually sync to phone
So…let’s say I bought an app for my iPhone and also successfully installed this app on my mother’s phone through your method. Will my mother still require my password from my iTunes account to update the app each time an update is released? Or will her password for her account be able to do it?
Is it my imagination or did your instructions indicate: On one computer, buy and install the app. On another computer, buy and install the app. Then you can have two copies..of course you can, you just bought two copies. What am I missing here?
You already bought it the first time. You’re just downloading it for free the second time. Just what it says in the article.
The person that purchased the app can also connect to the destination iTunes and do “Transfer Purchases”. That will put a copy of that purchased app onto the destination iTunes.
Then connect the target iPhone to iTunes and do a sync.