Part of The Folder’s After You Sign series — see them all →
Digital Life
Setting Up Legacy Access on Your iPhone and Google Account
Most of your digital life runs through two accounts: your Apple ID and your Google Account. If your family can't get into either one, they're locked out of years of photos, emails, and documents — no matter how good the rest of your estate plan is. Both companies already built a fix for this. Most people just don't know it exists.
Good to know
Questions, answered.
Why does this actually matter so much?
Your phone isn't just a phone. It's the gatekeeper. Two-factor codes land there. Most apps route back through your Apple or Google account to prove who you are. If nobody can get past the lock screen, or into these two accounts, everything downstream stalls — the bank app, the password manager, the photos, all of it — even if every legal document you own is in order.
How do I set up a Legacy Contact on my iPhone?
A Legacy Contact can get into photos, messages, notes, files, downloaded apps, and device backups — but not anything you've purchased (movies, music, subscriptions), and not anything stored in Keychain, where your saved passwords, payment info, and passkeys stay private. To actually use it, your Legacy Contact needs both the access key and a copy of your death certificate; once approved, they have three years to access the data before it's deleted for good.
- Open Settings, then tap your name at the top
- Tap Sign-In & Security, then Legacy Contact
- Tap Add Legacy Contact and choose someone — they don't need an Apple device or an Apple ID, but they do need to be 13 or older
- Apple generates an access key for them — share it directly through your phone, or save/print it somewhere they'll actually find it later
How does Google's Inactive Account Manager work?
Google uses a different model — instead of a death certificate, it's based on a timer. Before anything happens, Google contacts you by text and email, more than once, giving you a chance to sign back in and reset the clock. Your contacts only hear from Google if you never respond.
- Go to myaccount.google.com/inactive while signed in
- Choose how long Google should wait before treating your account as inactive: 3, 6, 12, or 18 months
- Add up to 10 trusted contacts, and decide exactly what each one can see — Gmail, Drive, Photos, YouTube, Calendar, and more; you can split it up, one person gets Photos, another gets Gmail and Drive
- Optionally, set an auto-reply for anyone who emails you after the account goes inactive, and decide whether the account should be deleted once everything's been handled
What happens if I just skip this?
Without a Legacy Contact, your family has to go through Apple's manual process for a deceased user's account — it requires legal documentation and comes with no guarantee it will work. Google's standard process is similarly slow, and also requires legal paperwork with no guaranteed outcome. Setting both of these up ahead of time takes about 15–20 minutes total, one time. Skipping it can mean months of back-and-forth for your family, with an uncertain result.
Does this replace anything I'd record in The Folder?
No — think of these as two different systems that work together. Legacy Contact and Inactive Account Manager are the actual mechanisms Apple and Google use to unlock your accounts; nothing else can substitute for setting them up directly. What The Folder handles is the layer underneath that — the phone and computer access that everything else depends on. Add your phone passcode under Digital > Password Managers & Access using Mobile Phone as the entry type, and your computer login the same way under Computer. There's no rigid format — use the notes field for as much or as little as you're comfortable with. Everything in The Folder is encrypted to the same standard your bank uses, and we recommend turning on two-factor authentication for extra protection.
More on passwords and phone access →Quick checklist
- Apple Legacy Contact set up; access key stored somewhere your family will find it
- Google Inactive Account Manager set up; timeout and trusted contacts chosen
- Phone passcode, or where to find it, recorded somewhere your family can access
- Both noted as done in The Folder, so nobody has to guess
“Fifteen minutes now buys your family months they'd otherwise spend fighting two of the largest companies in the world for access to your own information.”
Real Case
The Feature That Exists Because of One Family's Two Months on Hold
A woman lost her husband after a long illness. Among what he left behind was a shared tablet — years of photos, saved documents, and apps they'd used together. She knew the device's passcode. What she didn't know was the separate account password behind it, the one tied to the app store and the cloud account where everything was actually backed up.
She contacted the company for help. She was told that releasing the password would require a court order — not a death certificate, not a will, an actual order from a judge.
Her family pushed back with exactly the documents that settle almost everything else in an estate: a will, a notarized death certificate, proof of the relationship. A representative initially indicated that would be enough. When they called back with everything in hand, the company had no record of that conversation and repeated that a court order was the only path forward.
Two months passed this way — calls, documents, being told to start over. A will and a death certificate are usually enough to transfer a house or a car. They weren't enough here, because a technology account isn't property in the same legal sense; it's access, governed by a company's own terms of service, and most companies built those terms around the assumption that only the original account holder would ever need in.
The standoff only broke after the family took the story to a news outlet and the company reached out directly, calling it a misunderstanding and resolving it without the court order it had spent two months insisting on.
This is the exact gap that Legacy Contact and Inactive Account Manager were built to close. Before these features existed, there was no dependable, pre-authorized path into an account after death — only a case-by-case judgment call by a support representative, which could go a hundred different ways depending on who picked up the phone. A will proves your family has the legal right to your things. It doesn't, by itself, prove anything to a login screen.
Setting up Legacy Contact or Inactive Account Manager now takes about fifteen minutes. The alternative, for one real family, took two months, several rounds of paperwork submitted twice, and a phone call to a newsroom before anyone with real authority agreed to help.
Based on a real, widely reported case that helped push a major technology company to build a formal legacy-access feature it hadn't previously offered.
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