Two Years Later, Still Locked Out
Every couple of weeks, we have a Friday evening dinner with the extended family. It’s about a 45-minute drive, during which we love to listen to music.
Since there are usually four of us in the car and everyone loves music (if you can even call what the teenagers are listening to ‘music’), it was pretty tricky to agree on what to play. Plus, yelling song names at Siri from the back seat wasn't going to work anyway.
Then, in 2023, iOS 17 introduced one of the best features of the year (at least in my opinion): SharePlay on CarPlay. It lets others share music from their own phone directly to the one connected to the car.
At the time my youngest was 12 - and in our region, the feature is available from age 13, which means the problem was only half solved.
A year passed and on my youngest’s 13th birthday we tried again, and... we got the following message: "Feature Unavailable: Your account doesn't meet the minimum age requirement for this feature."
We waited a few days, and still nothing. I've tried Google, Reddit, all of the AI chat bots and even Bing- to no avail. So we've decided to wait another year.
A few weeks ago, she celebrated her 14th birthday. We tried once more, just to face the same taunting message of "Feature Unavailable" yet again.
This time I was determined to fix this, and so, many hours later, I came across this post post on Apple community, which somehow eluded me last year.
The post suggests there might be bug in which the age is not automatically updated upon reaching the age of 13 and recommends these steps:
Sign out of your account on Media and Purchases (Settings > Tap Your Name > Media & Purchases > Sign Out
Uninstall Apple Music app
Restart device
Install Apple Music app
Sign back into account on Media and Purchases
Go into Apple Music app
I tried so many solutions the last two years without success so obviously I was skeptical. But at this point I was willing to try anything.
I followed the guide to the letter, held my breath, and it worked. Problem solved, my daughter was over the moon. But this created a new major problem, we now need to listen to her so called "music".