I was telling my youngest daughter, “When something like this happens, I can’t rest until I figure it out.”
What was that? At some point in iOS 16, our Apple Family setup stopped sending notifications for “Ask to Buy” purchases from our daughters. I don’t know if this started on the first installation of iOS 16 on my devices or on theirs, but it was plain broken. It’s supposed to send a notification to my wife and I whenever our daughters want to install an app or execute an App Store purchase. We’re pretty liberal about what we approve for our daughters, but it was still nice to have that functionality. But now, it was busted.
I researched high and low and discovered that this kind of thing has happened off and on for other users since 2018. There were a myriad of proposed solutions. Most of them suggested to rename the parents’ devices in Settings → General → About. Apparently, this often cleared a logjam of notifications and this situation was one such logjam.
But this time around it didn’t work.
Another suggestion was to log out of iCloud on the parents’ devices. OK, I get that, but I’m getting pretty tired of having to do this. I was facing the possibility that I would need to log a bug report with Apple and try to move on with my life. Our youngest was getting pretty frustrated with my numerous attempts to resolve this. That’s why I said the above to her.
I thought that maybe this had something to do with turning on Advanced Data Protection on my iCloud account. I remembered that I had not enabled this on my wife’s devices yet, so that wasn’t a likely situation. She wasn’t receiving the notifications either.
My last gasp was to try to sign my daughter’s iCloud account out of her devices, then back in.
It worked.
That’s when I discovered that Apple changed the way these notifications are delivered. They are no longer sent through the normal notification place. Now they’re sent through iMessage. If your child has a group chat with both parents, it will use that group chat to deliver the message. Otherwise, it will create a new thread between your child and the parents.
Now you get the notification in iMessage instead.
At first I was confused by this new functionality. It didn’t make sense. But now that I think about it, there’s some benefit to this approach. Now I can see which one of us (my wife or myself) approved the request and when it was approved. This also guarantees the delivery of the notification to all devices. It’s actually not a bad idea t all.
So there you have it. If you installed iOS 16 across the board and “Ask to Buy” notifications quit working, try signing your child out and back in of their iCloud Account on all of their devices. This appears to nudge iOS 16 into the desired new way of delivering the notifications.