Issues with Apple IDs, family sharing and merging

Easy one first:

In order to share a subscription, Family Sharing has to be set up., as you appear to have done with the Gmail account. As the Organizer you have committed yourself to pay for any purchases unless the other family member has sufficient personal account balance to pay for the item and it is one that can be purchased with personal balance.

• Based on: How to share apps and purchases with Family Sharing - Apple Support and How apps, content, and subscriptions from Apple are billed - Apple Support

An account can only be associated with a single Family at any one time, plus there are limits to how frequently it can change families.

Now it gets complicated. Here are some things to note:

Note that referring to one account as "iCloud" can be confusing because your gmail identified Apple Account could also have an iCloud email address associated with it.

You can also have an iPhone signed into one account for most purposes, but have app and media purchases using a different Apple account. You would set that up through the Media & Purchases setting.

Unless you have a very good reason for needing two Apple Accounts it is best sticking to one. I would not use an iCloud address for that account since should you ever have problem with the account you won't be able to read any emails Apple sends to that account to help you. Stick with the Gmail based one unless you really have a lot of things associated with the iCloud account. If that is the case you can keep the iCloud one but you would preferably change the email address identifier on that account to a third party address. It cannot be the Gmail address unless you do a very complicated three way address change which I won't go into unless you want me to.

Apple doesn't have any official account merging process but they do now let you move purchases from one account to another. If all you use one account for is purchases you may wish to move those to your main account. Migrate purchases from one Apple Account to another Apple Account - Apple Support You'll need to see how this affects your family sharing setup.

If you do wish to do additional data merging, you can mostly do that. Let me know because that is its own very long post.

Uh, realize this is a user to user interface, not official Apple Support. For this kind of account merging you might get Apple's (and frankly from some contributors here too) official "no account merging" reply. ;-) On the other hand, I have some home things to do today so I may not readily respond.

Again, some of what you need to do and how you can (or why you cannot) do them depends upon what setup you desire and details about what you have now. Apple has the whole thing set up so that from the start you only have and ever have a single account. Once you set up multiple accounts then things get messy fast. As I said earlier, if all the "iCloud" one has in it is the TV subscription, just merge those into to the "Gmail" account and then set up Family Sharing from that account if necessary.

This is complicated because I do not know exactly what you have in each account, and which account you want to use in the end. Don't forget, by the way, you can work with email being sent to the iCloud (or any email account frankly) in the Gmail account simply by adding it to the Mail app. I read both my non-Apple email accounts from my iPhone (and my computer). I don't even have iCloud mail set up on my account. Read this support article for how to add an email account to your iPhone - Add an email account to your iPhone or iPad - Apple Support