Migrate purchases from one Apple Account to another(support.apple.com) |
Migrate purchases from one Apple Account to another(support.apple.com) |
I’ve never tried doing Family Sharing with this setup because it seemed confusing — it wants to use the iCloud account as the primary one whereas I’ve always added credit to the purchases account (taking advantage of some Apple Store Code discount offers).
Now, I have some credit balance on my purchases account, but I do see the “Migrate Purchases” option in settings even though this document says it won’t be available until I:
> Spend any balance remaining on your secondary Apple Account.
If this is enforced during migration or prevents me from migrating, I’d have to wait for a year or so to use up that balance. Apple really should’ve included account balance transfer as part of the migration.
To add to this mess, I actually have two purchases accounts across two different countries (i.e., one purchases account for one country and another one for a different country). I’ve only purchased free items in one of those accounts. This works, with some inconvenience, while I don’t touch my iCloud account at all.
I’m really interested in getting this sorted out (using one account per family member and using Family Sharing), but it looks like I may run into more problems.
If anyone here did read all the way till here, I’m open to suggestions on simplifying this as well as warnings and gotchas.
I'm deep in the Apple ecosystem and yet this - what you speak of - is precisely why I will never try to really exercise any Apple software.
The company finds it impossible to do anything as simple and helpful as draw a system diagram of (say) laptop, phone, cloud, and their mirrorings, and their backups one to another, and their basic interactions.
To take the most obvious example, the precise workings of iTunes - even at the level of user visibility - were always a mystery, and shall always remain so, even in their subsequent reincarnations.
Yes, they could find ways to mitigate that and could even transfer purchases without balance. But it is worth considering the anti-fraud angle.
But really, OMG, finally. I tried the process and it worked. Goodbye, legacy account I've been dragging along with me for the last decade!
Edit: "Make sure both accounts are set to the same country and region for purchases." Arghh!
Owned purchases may have some sort of import fee to account for lost tax revenue to make sure not purchased in country with lower tax then transferred which may be very complex to calculate.
Media/music especially is often edited/licensed for a specific country and only offered in a specific language per country. I’d prefer if Apple owned up to being a premier media outlet by providing every cut, sub and dub offered in every country for a single purchase in any country, but I am sure it saves Apple a few pennies on network transport and translator fees to restrict the options. If they could get a music contract allowing for original songs any director used originally that would be cake. Just imagine learning a languages by watching the original cut of your favorite movies in other languages. If Eddy Cue wanted to leave a memorable legacy it would be remove as many region restrictions as possible creating a class of global citizens.
This is a setting nowadays, meaning that you can now change that for any account now. I have done that a few times already.
Super frustrating and it won’t let me undo the migration right now either.
On a related note, something interesting, but not sure if it can be reproduced anymore: there are universal ones like this Huawei smart app back in 2019, for the smart band and bathroom scale I had at the time. I had to download it from my country's store for a simple signup/login process, because if I did it from the US store, it always needed a phone number. They worked the same, and I'm pretty sure it was the same app (as in the ID, app bundle, and all that... not a different app for the other market) Could that have been possible?
https://daringfireball.net/linked/2025/02/11/about-migrating...
I submitted a blog post on how to merge manually about 4 years ago:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27797535
https://brianstucki.com/how-to-manually-merge-two-apple-ids-...
I'm sure glad I procrastinated on that.
• Once upon a time there was the iTunes music store. This was before Apple got into cloud services. Your iTunes account was identified by your email address.
• Later Apple got into cloud services with their MobileMe product. When you created your MobileMe account you were given an Apple email address, such as one at @mac.com or @me.com.
• MobileMe accounts could not buy stuff on the iTunes store and iTunes accounts could not buy MobileMe stuff.
• At some point the MobileMe (or its successor iCloud) accounts and iTunes accounts were merged becoming an Apple account.
This merger did not try to merge individual iTunes and cloud accounts. It simply merged the systems. New users only needed to create one Apple account, but those of us who were around from the iTunes days ended up with two Apple accounts.
• If you try to do something that requires being logged into your Apple account when you are not logged in you get prompted to log in.
Sometimes it is not clear what triggered this. Is it something that needs you Apple account that was once an iTunes account or your Apple account that was once a MobileMe account?
Eventually many of us eventually logged into the wrong account, so say we are trying to buy a song but mistakenly sign in to our Apple account that was once a MobileMe account, or we were trying to buy extra cloud storage and mistakenly sign in to our Apple account that was once our iTunes account.
Now we've got purchases on both accounts. Similarly it was easy to end up with calendars on both accounts and email on both accounts.
• Until this Apple provided absolutely no support for straightening this out. For calendars and cloud storage and similar you could pick one account and copy everything from your other account to it and delete it from the other and cancel your paid storage.
But if you had purchased music or movies or books or apps on both accounts you were screwed, unless you wanted to purchase them again.
Sometimes you got lucky. Apps were they only things I had purchased on both, and the ones on the account that has once been a MobileMe account were all free so it was no big deal to just "purchase" them again on the other account.
My phone still occasionally asks me to sign in to the account that was once a MobileMe account, but I've never been able to figure out why. Everything that I'm aware of that requires an Apple account login is set to use the account that was once an iTunes account, and I don't notice any problems when I refuse to login to the former MobileMe account.
You can’t migrate purchases if both of your accounts have Apple Music libraries. This is minor, as you can get around it by simply deleting everything out of the primary (aka non-purchasing) account. He did know that it will also migrate iTunes Match, though, which I had been worried about since it's not mentioned in any of the support documents, and it doesn't even show up in my subscription list. He said they include iTunes Match as part of Apple Music itself, so it's not listed separately.
The MUCH bigger deal (especially if you use Family Sharing) is that you cannot have shared your iCloud storage more than 1 other account. Well, I have a wife, 2 kids, and my purchases account. The only way around this is for me to disband my “Family”, then do the migration, then re-create my family… BUT it’s not that easy, because kids MUST be in a family. SO, first my wife has to create a Family. Then I disband my Family and transfer the kids to hers, where she’s the organizer, not me. Then I do the migration. Then I rejoin the family, but she hates tech, so I need to be the organizer, so then she has to leave her own Family, which will make me the organizer by default. Then she can join back. Then we should be ok… except that during that whole time they will have zero iCloud storage (it’s all on my account), and no access to our subscriptions (all on my account), and no access to family shared apps… AND if anything goes wrong, we’re in a huge effing mess.
Oh, and I forgot to ask if or how it would affect our Photos library, where my wife and I each have a private library, but also share a library with 150k photos and videos in it.
Thanks for taking the time to write this up.
Is this not a severe restriction? (I am unsure as I am not entirely sure I understand what it means.)
This post, though...pure ad.
Sony, I'm looking at you...
Hey, did you know that Apple discovered that they can allow you to select multiple languages simultaneously for the spell checker? When? In iOS 18...
Like, for example, Belgium hasn't existed since iOS 1 (they use at least 3 languages currently there, as far as I know).
When iOS 18 came out with this feature I turned it off, because it's not smart enough to infer context (at least when I used it, maybe it got better?), and messed up autocorrects.
Streaming goes through the Prime portal so it's more tricky, but getting access to foreign ebooks without trouble is to me a pretty big deal.
Some apps are country specific. My banking app wasn't available in the USA app store, so that alone meant I had to keep a separate iPhone.
It will maintain authentication for some time and let you update the app, but eventually it expires. Then you get the sketchiest dialog box ever randomly when doing anything on your phone:
“If you have an Apple ID, enter the password”
What it actually means to say is, “I know you have another Apple ID that’s not currently logged in as primary, and I’m trying to background update apps owned by that account but the authentication expired. Please enter the password for [other Apple ID].”
Apple could do the same, with sufficient internal or external motivation.
https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/es/ip_24_...
Apple should publish a blog post on why it took 20 years to fix :)
But then, that was the behaviour even before iOS 18 when I had two keyboards installed. It just took it longer to give up and accept both languages on both keyboards :)
Good use case for Apple Intelligence: pick the best customer-authored translation of incoherent error messages and display in an optional overlay.
- earn high margin revenue with low input costs
- save planetary raw materials
- save customer time, energy and space costs
- improve customer security via data segregation
- increase per-device storage revenue
Ignoring customer needs via artificial inefficiency leads to stagnant growth.
Also even without the anglosphere management they're an island and crossing a border is ... complex ... for them :)
"oh but genewitch the US is a huge country, you can't compare!"
i know. i wish people would remember that when discussing "policy."
edit: per the OP the EU is 50% the size of the US, in land area. So even put in that perspective, i don't consider Japan to be a "large" country. Yes, their population density is crazytown but "continent sized countries" japan is not a member of that set.
You probably don't even realize that PSN accounts are tied to countries and Sony does not allow changing country because of "regional rights". Or more because of laziness and/or incompetence, since 99% of titles are available worldwide anyway.
Wouldn't be much of a problem but they think they're some government and only allow paying them with cards based in the country's account... and of course with grey market prepaid cards from the right country, beause who's going to take that seriously?