How to manually merge two Apple IDs to one (2020) | Hacker News Reader

How to manually merge two Apple IDs to one (2020)

brianstucki.com

123 pointsjs277 comments

I agree with the article's conclusion that as bad as this manual merging process is, Apple trying to offer an automated account merge would be a nightmare.

They don't provide any backwards compatibility when adding even minor new features to apps like Notes or Reminders that synchronize through iCloud. If you update your iPhone but not your Macbook, new notes created on the phone may be silently ignored on the Macbook, or mysteriously vanish into the void if you perform one of the bulk operations that replaces the canonical list of existing objects with the older software's limited accessible subset.

I also know from experience that changing your Apple ID email address (which is permitted) will leave many iCloud services confused and trigger sporadic strange pop-up messages about your account status for years. I would not trust a merge button that needs to deal with disparate photo libraries (any of which may have existing byzantine compatibility baggage from the upgrade from iPhoto to Photos), Notes, Reminders, and all of the other services to leave a well-used account in a reasonable state.

It's non-deterministic because they don't care about it, because caring about or not caring about it are treated equally - there are no forces that make them need to care. There is no profit motive. I have an iPad signed into an account I created on the fly to try to "start from scratch" - I didn't realize that there would be no way to have interoperability with another 15 year account I had with Apple. Of course, now that that's the case - I just have to deal with some nonsense restriction that's imposed because of some risk-averse lawyer sitting in a corner office.

Glad I can still torrent movies, cheers to Bram Cohen for advancing the field and denting the absurd DRM culture that's developed.

"caring about or not caring about it are treated equally - there are no forces that make them need to care"

I find this assumption that large organisations like Apple are rational, perfectly optimised economic actors very odd. People would never apply it to a government but give it to a nepotistic dictatorship like Apple without a second thought.

Apple has a culture problem re regressions which is only hurting them and not benefiting them.

Two years after I moved countries, my credit card expired from my home country, so I wanted to use my new UK card, which requires changing your Apple ID country.

Changing your Apple ID country requires cancelling all your subscriptions, including Apple Music, which deleted my entire music collection (even my previously uploaded iTunes Match library). When faced with the prospect of starting from scratch, i just moved to Spotify.

Why not just download the songs from iTunes Match, then reupload after the switch?

My fault, I just didn't think about the process that much - I wasn't thinking about "cancelling Apple Music", more about just changing card/countries. I figured it would keep my library around, just deactivated.

I actually did end up attempting to restore backups where i had downloaded everything, but as soon as I signed in with my account it just deleted everything from my local library again.

I had been using windows more and more and I didn't care so I switched to Spotify and am better for it.

Man, that sounds like it would work, but what an annoying workaround for a stupid problem on their side - which I guess has to do with music licensing in different jurisdictions.

Makes me think of this scene: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyVZFm7P0CQ

I was just going to make this comment, but it's funny how stuff "in the cloud" has jurisdictions. I'm reminded of a Saudi Arabian guy I sat next to on a plane from Austria to Turkey. He couldn't get iTunes on his iPad to play stuff because... he was in the wrong region. Serves him (and his girlfriend) right, they came on board the plane as the last 2 people carrying six large shopping bags as carry-ons.

I also had to change my Apple ID country once — the system blocked me because I had credit left on my account after applying a gift card. The amount remaining on my account? 4 cents.

I had the same problem with remaining 50 uen moving country from Japan to Europe. But call to Apple Support solved the problem..

For the record, changing country on Spotify is fairly easy. You need to cancel your subscription and wait for your account to be a free one, then change your country and restart a new subscription.

You don’t lose anything because free accounts keep the same data.

On Spotify, there is some music that is only available in some countries. But it's a small fraction of the music, probably less than 0.1%. When switching countries, those songs will be kept in your playlists even if unplayable, IIRC.

When changing country on iCloud, did you lose all your purchases (apart from subscriptions)? Like books, apps, movies…

I lost some but not most of my movies. Same for apps. Music was the worst, but on Apple Music so not purchases (just had to re-add a lot of things to my library).

It has to do with how the individual content (film, app, song) is licensed. If the same content has a separate license in the new country, it won’t carry over.

Also note this means it will depend on the two countries you are moving between (ie. I went US > UK, and I would guess there is a lot more licensing crossover between these two countries, whereas two others may not have so much).

And this is why I flat-out will not buy digital content unless:

1. It's DRM-Free.

2. I can remove the DRM. (All iTunes movies released prior to 2020 fall into this category.)

3. It's cheap enough that I can treat it like a rental; I fully expect to loose access after a few years and anything longer is a bonus.

No. The only thing I lost was my entire music library. All other purchases remained, from what I can tell.

That's why they warn you when you open Notes or Reminders and give you an opportunity to not upgrade so all your devices are compatible with each other.

> Like many long time Mac users, I had one Apple ID for iCloud and another one for iTunes. I can’t remember exactly how this happened but I know I’m not alone.

Here's a common way this happened.

1. You got an iTunes account first, before the predecessor of iCloud even existed. The Apple ID this created was associated with your regular email address.

2. You got a .Mac or MobileMe account early on. Those originally required you to use an email address at one of the Apple-owned domains (@mac.com or, I think, @mobileme.com, and maybe one or two more). Thus you ended up with another Apple ID associated with that email address.

@me.com, not @mobileme.com. But yep.

Yep. I’ve been trying to delete my @mac.com ID for years, for various reasons this is impossible (2FA, unreleased apps, etc.). It’s one of the special ones where you can’t change the email address you use to sign in with, you have to use @mac.com.

Annoyed me enough that I burned 15 years of purchases and other history to start again from scratch on a new ID I control completely.

But I can’t get rid of the old one, and it has some link to my phone number due to it using 2FA which cannot be removed, since 2FA is a one way trip. Which confuses the hell out of the Apple Watch (No one can add me for activity sharing since I switched to the new Apple ID).

And yes, every device under my control has been wiped and reset without a restore, no go.

Hotel California…

> Yep. I’ve been trying to delete my @mac.com ID for years, for various reasons this is impossible (2FA, unreleased apps, etc.). It’s one of the special ones where you can’t change the email address you use to sign in with, you have to use @mac.com.

This is no longer true. I was able to change the primary email address on my @mac.com account to my personal domain. I did this maybe a year ago. The @mac.com address is still associated as an alias I can’t delete but it’s no longer the primary address.

For me the Apple ID has always been the one and only.

What I got later on as an unwanted extra, was an @icloud.com email address that was linked with my existing Apple ID.

That’s exactly the order for me. My iTunes account was so old that it wasn’t even an email address, it was just a username. I don’t mind the two separate accounts for iCloud vs iTunes, but was annoyed when Apple aggressively started trying to force me to change away from a “username” to an account login based on an “email address”. I finally caved and did it a while back, being told that I wouldn’t need to re-login on every device, but that turned out to be a lie. I’ve also had to call Apple three times to get some kind of “security alert” cleared on the account (they seem to immediately know the issue and fix it quickly, but won’t describe why it happens) following the change or otherwise I’m blocked from making purchases.

I got the iTunes account a long, long time ago. And then when I heard the @me accounts were going to go free, I got one so I could name-squat. And then when I totally drink the Apple Kool-Aid I find out that I can't merge the two accounts, even though I've changed the iTunes account email a couple times.

So now it's a continuous exercise in trying to remember which account I use for what. Essentially, if it involves money, it's the iTunes account. Well, except to pay for the iCloud storage. Yeah, pretty straightforward.

This article misses out on one of the most important things, something that CAN NOT be moved: Purchased apps.

Somehow, I have two different Apple accounts. Both are tied to the same e-mail address (which _should_ be impossible, and in fact, if I try to edit the profile of one, it complains that I can't do that since the e-mail address is already in use). This means that whenever I want to set up an iDevice, I need to log in to one account, download all the apps I want from there, then switch the App Store to the other account, and download the rest of the apps.

Of course, Apple support told me to pound sand. But at least they were friendly about it.

It’s possible to merge these. Support can do it as a one time thing. You have to get past triage “support”, past scripted support, to a fully empowered support level person.

What a nightmare! Spoiler: it's not a merge, there is no way to merge, only a thousand things to copy and reconfigure

Yeah, it's more of a manual merge.

Just FYI, since the author got close (Apple Pay and Apple Pay Cash), but didn't directly touch on this:

For those who've signed up for Apple Card, currently Goldman Sachs (the bank that issues the Apple Card) does not permit moving cards from one Apple ID to another. The only way to "move" is to close the first card and reapply on the other ID, which is not a guaranteed approval.

This is insane. I looked into this because I have a work (my own work) iPad and then my primary user account across like 5 computers. Because they all have like 1-2TB of storage each, I havent found a consistent backup solution that makes sense in terms of price/convenience and I just manually backup like 1-50GB of "very important" existentially critically pieces of info.

It should be very easy to merge accounts. Even a naive implementation could just modify references from account_you_dont_care_about (A1) to account_you_want_to_be_primary (A2) and then delete A2.

Such a burden on the everyday consumer. Extremely, extremely frustrating. I understand why my parents and others in their generation feel confused by some nuances, because this is just a non-transparent, de-prioritized product goal that will never be improved. I hope we legislate this as part of the Right to Repair plan, it's adjacent.

then delete A1, surely.

there's a lot of content on A1 that was bought and purchased over the last 15 years or so!

I think the real answer is legislation to let purchased digital content get moved arbitrarily between accounts. This would also create a second hand market, which there should be.

Surely our elected officials will deliver.

I just noticed what you were saying - yes lol, delete the account that you've migrated stuff off of.

Good catch, too many numbers.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCud8H7z7vU

> It should be very easy to merge accounts.

This can not be further from the truth. It is extremely difficult to do this. Anyone who says this is easy does not understand how difficult it is to do this across a modern distributed information system. Most services do not do this, because it is so exceedingly difficult, not because they don't want to.

If you can't serve your users properly, then your information system is fundamentally broken and your architecture is inept. If your system is so distributed that you can't properly change linkages across the same user's multiple accounts, your system is poorly engineered.

>It should be very easy to merge accounts. Even a naive implementation could just modify references from account_you_dont_care_about (A1) to account_you_want_to_be_primary (A2) and then delete A2.

Logic bugs are a hell of a thing.

They've had more than a decade to figure out their schemas and their distributed systems - a failure at this level is inexcusable, and is indicative of architectural laziness and potentially a lack of excellence.

I meant in OP's comment; it's not A2 they want to delete.

I have a problem where I can’t find a Solution. Maybe anyone here has an hint for me. I had an selfhosted owncloud carddav server wish dosent exist anymore. I used it for my contacts on my iPhone. These are now only stored locally but still internally in the owncloud account. When I delete the old owncloud carddav server then the iPhone will delete all contacts. I tested it when I bought a new iPhone and after setting it up with a transfer of all data I tester it on the old phone before I resettet it. I want to migrate my contacts to iCloud but I can’t find a clean way for doing this. Every app I testet messed up some aspects of the contacts. Mostly the picture or custom fields. Does anybody has a hint for me how I can comfortably and error free migrate away from this non existent owncloud carddav to icloud? Thanks in advance. :)

Fun times. I fought a version of this battle when Apple merged developer accounts into the general Apple ID - my developer account used the same email as my apple ID, but for some reason they created a new apple ID during the merge, so I had two different apple ids attached to the same email address...

I -- and I know how unlikely this sounds, so maybe this is how it happened...

I have an apple account with two different passwords. That work simultaneously, but on different services. The only way I figured this out is I evolve passwords with a numbering scheme; I kept forgetting the password, resetting, and incrementing a counter. I slowly realized I wasn't forgetting; it's that I had multiple passwords live.

I tested this as recently as 2 months ago.

The internal architecture that makes this possible... I assume it's why the phrase "swallows sadness" was invented.

This is actually possible for Gmail as well, although they have a UI for it. I discovered this when I tried to log in to an old business account on a custom domain (say, admin@example.com) and received a prompt to the effect of "The account admin@example.com is associated with both a G Suite Mail account and a Gmail account." with a list view of (two) accounts to choose from.

My conclusion at the time was that someone had associated a paid individual Gmail account with admin@example.com using the custom domain feature, and later created a G Suite account with the same name.

I have no idea how they decide which account (or both) receives an incoming message as I only had the password for one of the two admin@example.com accounts.

There’s actually no such thing as a paid gmail account separate from a g suite account- there is only gmail.com (consumer) and @domain (paid g suite/workspace). But it may be possible that you or someone else created a Google account for admin@example.com, and then separately provisioned a g suite account for the same address with a different password. This is not at all uncommon, as lots of people sign up for a Google account with their work email address for use with search and YouTube and so on, and then later their employer switches to Workspace for email and suddenly there’s all these conflicts. There is a process for merging and claiming these, but I don’t remember how it works off the top of my head.

But to answer your implied question - there are two accounts, but only one mailbox. If you chose to log in to the Google account, you would not have access to gmail.

(Source: work on workspace@google. Obviously only my own opinion)

No one believed me when I said this happened, and further password resets tidied it up and I decided I was just wrong.

It seems I wasn’t.

Yep. After fighting this situation for about a year I leaned on Apple support and they were able to merge the accounts (unclear if they were generally willing to do that, or I just got lucky and assigned a friendly CS agent).

On a similar note, my daughter and I share an iTunes account so she can have access to apps and music I purchased. She has her own Apple ID for iCloud.

One day, I receive a password reset notification for my personal Apple ID. I freak out, as I now have lost access to my Apple ID and imagine any moment now the attacker will wipe my devices.

Turns out my daughter was unable to download an app, so she went through (successfully) the password reset flow for my Apple ID! It’s definitely not obvious, but apparently you can reset the credentials for someone else’s Apple ID if that id is used for iTunes and the App Store on another device.

Your daughter has and uses your Apple account, and you're surprised that she can reset the password? I'm really confused by this story, much less how Apple is in any way to blame or this is at all surprising.

As an aside, what you described is serviced by Family Sharing now. I have my wife and my four kids in my Family -- literally and from an Apple account perspective -- and they all have access to my purchases (and each others, unless the product specifically forbids it which is rare), my Apple One Premiere, etc. It's a wonderful system.

Apple family sharing didn’t exist when I started using the ecosystem and last time I tried using family sharing exclusively it wouldn’t share the purchased music and apps from my account with the other family members.

The behavior is confusing because there are two accounts on the device - her personal iCloud account and the App Store/iTunes account. One would assume that the password reset would reset her iCloud account and not the App Store account. Or at least I would have received some sort of notification on my devices which are logged into the iCloud account that a password reset is attempted.

I’ll agree that the situation is not ideal, but Apple has made the whole experience a big mess.

It shares (and maybe always shared?) music and apps. Not just that, can also share among family members, not just head to others.

It doesn’t auto-share, they have to express an acquisition intent (click Buy) and it costs $0.

Apple has done an amazing job making family sharing seamless across most kinds of scenarios, and getting devs to support the licensing model.

Only your devices should be logged into both accounts (your iCloud account and your iTunes account). You can then use family sharing and purchase sharing to share from the iTunes account to all of the accounts in the family.

None of your family members should be logged into anything but their own iCloud accounts.

Somehow I have a different App Store account than my iCloud account than my Apple ID account. And I have some music from my older App Store account that I don’t want to spend hours and possibly corrupt my newer App Store account with. It’s a big mess and honestly I can’t remember ever making a decision to use different accounts. It just kind of happened.

> I have found no way to move a purchase history over to another Apple ID. I’m still working through this one. I’m hoping to find a friend of a friend that can move things over for me.

Yeah, that's what we need government intervention to fix.

I’m curious what email service you ended up using? I have been thinking to move out of gmail but it just feels like there isn’t good free alternative and also task of changing email address everywhere seems like behemoth task.

I'll have to do something similar for my daughter who has an account which claims she is a few years older than she actually is and who now wants to be part of the family group with a child account.

I wonder if contacting Apple to adjust the age might work

It just doesn't work. Try reading the help forums again.

Not directly related to the article but the author posting on twitter that they want to move all of their accounts to one company seems like a terrible idea.

Surely having multiple accounts is safer for both counter-party risk and insurance?

The trade off is continuous low grade toil to maintain the multiple accounts. When you’ve hit the 6-person family limit on Apple ID family sharing, (as the author notes) toil has high cost.

"$AAPL stock rises 2.69% after-hours after HN post reveals the depth of effective vendor lock-in, inability to merge accounts."

I recently realized that, with me using my Apple devices less and less frequently, and having abandoned all of Apple's services long ago, I no longer remember my Apple ID password.

I still occasionally use one iPad for testing on iOS 7 Safari, and when the surprise unprompted prompt for the password appeared, I realized this. Of course, I clicked Cancel. There's one less bullshit service to submit to.

It's a great feeling.

Do you honestly think Android and Google are better?

In my experience, yes.

I can load .apk files directly onto my device, without using Google Play Store, which is optional.

An Android device has NEVER locked up on me, demanding "activation", which then makes me wait 10-20 seconds before timing out and not working. (Happened two different devices, and that's just recently, and one I was not able to recover.)

I can install different versions of Chrome, Chromium, and even non-Google browser distributions and engines like Bromite, all independent of the OS. Bromite is the only mobile browser I know which has a "View Source" command in the menu. (No, adding "view-source:" to the beginning of the address bar using kludgy cursor control and text entry, is NOT workable.)

I can even get a command prompt with a GNU/POSIX environment and bash.

And I can sort-of kind-of access the file system with a whole array of different tools.

All on every stock device I've ever tried. I recently rediscovered a 2013 device with Android 5.0.1 on it, and I was able to install the latest Bromite on it. It's now my daily driver.

I would say that's not just better, that's MUCH better.

Google business is built on using your data, it is truly an Ad company, while Apple is not. And common perception of Android as open source, it is not. Google Play Services runs all the time and is closed source.

I'm not sure what you mean by that, but it doesn't change how useless Apple devices are to me.

I meant Privacy, it is important to me.

If I only use a non-Google web browser and don't sign into Google's services, where are the privacy leaks?

Are you aware that Apple is capable of browsing the entirety of your iCloud backup data?

> Apple is capable

See my previous reply, they are not in Ad business, they make money on devices.

They are in the ad business. They're just not as successful as Google. For example they sell ads for App Store searches. They used to run an ad network called iAd for use in iOS apps but it just wasn't successful so it was discontinued.

Apple makes money on devices, but they also make boatloads on selling apps, subs and micro transactions in the App Store such that they have incentives to keep that as closed as possible to keep consumers going through them and only them for mobile software needs.

All that you said just confirms they don’t need or use users data. Closed, yes, but I feel safer this way, I’m a consumer, not developer.

Someone else locking up and managing your data for you is great until you want something not in the playbook.

I'm sticking with text files and such, which I can manage myself.

Yeah Stock Android might not be that privacy friendly, but it being opensourced means I can use something like AOSP if I so may desire and sideload all apps I need. For me, control over my devices is more important. I do not want to trust the words of a random company.

Ofcourse there are a few issues with this approach, it reduces the security of the device (Unlocked firmware), Some apps depend on Google Play services and will refuse to run, (usually it's the games depending on Google Play Games). And using any Google Service (gmail, youtube) requires me to install google play services. (Which honestly defeats the whole prupose). Apple's ecosystem is quite "nice" and just works out of the box and they have shown themselves to be trustworthy in the past. I just don't want to be locked to their ecosystem.

> I can load .apk files directly onto my device, without using Google Play Store, which is optional.

For several years now, you’ve been able to sideload apps on an iPhone using a free developer account. Yes there are caveats, but those caveats have 3rd party MacOS apps to smooth them over.

> is the only mobile browser I know which has a "View Source" command in the menu

There’s iPhone apps which add an extension to MobileSafari so it becomes essentially a menu item.

> I can even get a command prompt with a GNU/POSIX environment and bash. And I can sort-of kind-of access the file system with a whole array of different tools

This exists too on iOS. The app is called iSH and is available on the AppStore. It’s not full filesystem access, but neither is your solution from the sound of it.

iOS sideloading is awful. What if you don't have a Mac? What if you need to spend a week away from yours? What if you want to load something and forget it? There is nothing like F-Droid on iOS, and there never could be. Granted, this affects enthusiasts more than the average user, but it's still a key difference.

At least you can use extensions on iOS Safari now. This is a major step forward from when I last used an iPhone (iPhone 6 before I switched to Android). On the other hand, you cannot switch rendering engines (as I have, to Gecko with Fennec), nor is there likely to ever be a way to install an extension such as "Bypass Paywalls Clean", which I have in Fennec --- an essential for me, among a number of other great FF extensions).

As for iSH, I again must commend Apple for a step forward, as there was no way this would have been allowed a few years ago. It's true that it runs in emulation rather than natively as Termux does, but still, not a bad step. (Termux, btw, can be allowed to access any of the user files, but can't touch the root fs on Android without rooting.)

>For several years now, you’ve been able to sideload apps on an iPhone using a free developer account.

Android doesn't require a specific machine to be able to side-load. Plenty of people only own an iPhone and no other part of the Apple ecosystem, so they effectively cannot sideload.

I use Fennec F-Droid with a custom addon collection for true extensions on Android. (There is a view source one, btw, and I now have an entry for it in my menu.)

While I have used custom ROMs before, this is all on a stock ROM Android phone. Any can do it. That's the beauty of it.

I could give up Apple completely, except for their phones, and the Ipad.

I will probally live long enough to see a better phone than Apple.

It's the Ipad that companies need to jump on. There just isn't any real competition. The head of Amazon's fire devices shouid be fired immediately. They get it wrong in every aspect, with every new devise.

(I am glad Apple takes security very serious, and kicks out questionable apps. I could care less they take 30% for the right to get on their platform. That piece if mind is worth paying more.)

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