Google has officially announced a new feature for its Play Store, which will help families save some precious money. Remember having to buy the same app or game across every device your family owns? Well, you no longer have to do that, at least not in a few Countries.
The Google Play Family Library is a new family plan which allows you to share your purchased games, apps, books, movies, tv shows, across all of your family’s devices. That number is actually limited to 6 devices, but considering that almost every family has 1 device per family member, this is an excellent idea.
You will be able to select which content will be added to the family library, so you will have control over which games, apps etc you will retain for your own private use.
Hopefully, this allows you to play the same games or use the same apps simultaneously. It has to be, because Google Play doesn’t employ very strict DRM like Steam does for the Steam Library Sharing, which only allows one person to play the game from the library, which is locked to that particular user.
The Google Play Family Library will be rolled out in Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, Ireland, Italy, Japan, Mexico, New Zealand, the United Kingdom and the United States, over the next few days. To sign up for the Family Library and to add devices to it, head over to the official sign up page.
Similarly Google also has something for music lovers, called the Google Play Music Family Plan, which allows unlimited streaming across the devices belonging to your family, for $14.99 a month. This was launched in December 2015, for the US, Canada, the UK, Australia, France and Germany. Now it is also available in Ireland, Italy, Mexico, and New Zealand.
It is a bit sad that services like Google Play Music and Spotify are still unavailable in India, a market where even Apple Music is available for Android. We did report about some Google Play Music listings with Indian pricing, so hopefully it will be available in the Country soon, along with YouTube Red.
