Both parents, one baby monitor: how family sharing works

In most households one phone quietly becomes the monitor. It lives on the bedside table of whoever installed the app, and the other parent gets woken second-hand, by an elbow rather than a notification. The arrangement holds until the person holding that phone is the one who has gone out.

Running two parent devices on the same baby unit fixes it. Two things have to be true for that to be worth doing. Both phones need to receive their own alerts, and the household needs to pay for premium once.

The short answer

Several parent devices can watch the same baby unit at the same time. Each one pairs by scanning the QR code the baby unit displays, and each one receives its own push notifications, so no phone is forwarding anything to another. Family sharing then covers the second device under the same premium subscription, which is why the second parent does not buy a second plan.

New installations of MonitorUltra require an active subscription to start monitoring, including audio. Any introductory trial depends on the selected App Store offer and eligibility. Existing installations with legacy audio access retain that access; it is not an offer for new users.

The subscription and trial guide explains current access and cancellation.

Adding the second parent unit

Nothing about the baby unit changes. It stays where it is, plugged in, doing the same job it did last night.

On the second phone:

1. Install MonitorUltra and open it. It needs iOS 17 or later, the same as the first parent unit.
2. Choose the parent unit role.
3. On the baby unit, open the pairing screen so it shows its QR code.
4. Scan that code from the second phone.

There is no second account to create on the baby unit and nothing to change on your router. If you have not set up the first pair yet, the old-iPhone guide covers the whole process from the start.

Both parent units reconnect on their own after that. You do not repeat the pairing each night.

You have to be in the room to add a device

The QR code appears on the screen of the phone in the nursery, so adding a parent unit means standing in front of it. That is mildly annoying when you want to add a grandparent's phone from another city. It is also the reason the baby unit needs no account and no password of its own.

Every parent unit gets its own alerts

This is the part that decides whether two parent units are actually useful.

When cry detection fires, every paired parent unit receives its own push notification. There is no chain, and no primary device that has to be awake and online for the second one to hear about it. If one parent has their phone on silent, the other still gets the alert on theirs.

The same applies to motion alerts, if you have them switched on. Both phones can also open the live view at the same time. The baby unit publishes one stream up to the relay, and the relay distributes it, so a second viewer does not double the upload coming out of the nursery.

A few arrangements this makes possible:

• Splitting the night. One parent turns notifications off for their shift while the other keeps them on, without touching the setup on the baby unit.
• One parent out of the house. Streaming works over cellular as well as Wi-Fi, so the parent unit at the restaurant gets the same alerts as the one upstairs. There is more on that in using a monitor over cellular.
• Both watching at once. Two people looking at the same live view during a bad night is the normal case, not an edge case.

Family sharing, and not paying twice

Premium is $7.99 a month or $49.99 a year, with a 30-day money-back guarantee, and you can cancel any time.

One person in the household subscribes. They then send a family invite link to whoever else needs it. Opening that link on the second phone joins it to the family group, and premium applies there too. If the app is not installed on that phone yet, install it first and open the invite link again afterwards, because the link needs the app to hand off to.

The subscription travels with the family group rather than with a device, so replacing a phone does not mean buying premium again.

Grandparents, babysitters and everyone who is not a parent

The mechanism is the same for anyone. A grandparent who has the children one afternoon a week, a babysitter, a night nurse: each of them becomes another parent unit, paired the same way.

Two things are worth thinking about before you hand out a slot. Anyone with a paired parent unit can see live video and hear live audio from the nursery whenever the baby unit is running. And because nothing is recorded anywhere, there is no history for them to scroll back through, which cuts both ways depending on what you wanted.

When you no longer want a device connected, unpair it.

When the second phone does not get alerts

This is the most common problem with a multi-parent setup, and it is almost always the new phone rather than the app. Work through it in this order.

1. Notification permission. iOS asks once, and a phone set up in a hurry often has it denied. Check Settings, Notifications, MonitorUltra, and confirm that Allow Notifications is on along with Lock Screen and Banners.
2. Focus modes. A Sleep or Do Not Disturb schedule on the second phone will hold notifications silently. Add MonitorUltra to the allowed apps for whichever Focus runs overnight, on both phones.
3. Low Power Mode. It can delay background delivery. Leave the parent unit charging overnight if you can.
4. Pairing. Open the app and confirm the second phone is showing the baby unit as connected rather than sitting on the pairing screen.

Test the result with the app fully closed and the phone locked. Have someone make a noise in the nursery while you watch the other phone from a different room. It takes five minutes and it is worth doing on every new parent unit.

The limits to know about before you rely on this

• iOS on both ends. There is no Android app and no browser viewer, so an Android phone cannot be the second parent unit.
• The baby unit stays plugged in. Continuous streaming will flatten a phone battery in a few hours, and it warms the device up while it does.
• Each parent unit needs its own permissions. Notifications have to be granted on that specific phone. Test it before you depend on it, with the app in the background.
• Alerts travel over the network. A parent unit with no signal receives nothing, in exactly the way a dedicated monitor's parent handset receives nothing out of range.

If you are still deciding whether an app-based monitor suits your household at all, the complete iPhone baby monitor guide covers the setup and the trade-offs in one place.

Frequently asked questions

Can two parents watch the video at the same time? Yes. Several parent devices can hold a live session on the same baby unit simultaneously, and each of them also gets its own notifications.

Does the second parent need their own subscription? No. That is what family sharing is for. One person subscribes and sends an invite link, and the phone that opens it is covered by the same plan.

Do both parent phones need to be on the same Wi-Fi as the baby unit? No. Streaming is relayed and works over Wi-Fi and cellular, so the two parent units can be on entirely different networks. Latency depends on both connections; test the setup you will use.

Can we use three devices in total? Yes. A spare iPhone as the baby unit and two current phones as parent units is the common setup. The spare only needs a working camera, microphone and iOS 17.

How do I stop a device receiving alerts? Unpair it from the baby unit if the change is permanent, or turn notifications off on that phone for a single night.