Migrate purchases from one Apple Account to another | Hacker News Reader

Migrate purchases from one Apple Account to another

support.apple.com

108 pointsjames_pm59 comments

I’ve been one of those people with one account for media, purchases and subscriptions and another one for iCloud. The purchases account, referred to as secondary in this document, is shared with family members (i.e., they use this same account and credentials for purchases too). Family members in turn have their own individual iCloud accounts.

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.

Maybe the balance transfer has some regulations and rules with fraud because it's "money"?

Ditto. I used a Coinstar machine earlier this year to convert a few years worth of coins to Apple gift cards, but I accidentally redeemed the cards to my Apple "Media & Subscriptions" account. Now I've got about $140 there. My Apple One family subscription will use it up soon enough so I set a reminder to migrate purchases in a few months.

> 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).

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.

It seems pretty likely that they block transfer of accounts with a balance to reduce the likelihood of fraud from account reselling. There may also be tax implications.

Yes, they could find ways to mitigate that and could even transfer purchases without balance. But it is worth considering the anti-fraud angle.

Now it would be great if Apple allowed associating more than one country for my purchases to my apple id, i.e. based on having credit cards issued by banks in different countries. Seems that for Apple does not exist the concept of living between to countries (expats, dual citizens, etc)

And other idiots that live in continent sized countries and don't realize that in Europe it's very easy to cross borders.

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).

Belgian born and raised. I had 3 keyboards on my phone, all QWERTY (I can't stand AZERTY) but with different spell checks (Dutch, French & English)

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.

I just use Romanian and English. Sometimes in the same phrase. Eventually it gave up and seemed to adapt enough to what i tend to type to not annoy me every time I send a message.

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 :)

Sony is a Japanese company and I've always thought of japan as a relatively small country. Maybe I'm wrong though.

Japan isn't that small (especially population wise) and besides when the playstation comes in the news there's an english sounding name attached to them.

Also even without the anglosphere management they're an island and crossing a border is ... complex ... for them :)

it's 4% the size of the US' land area. That's "small" to me.

"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.

Nitpicking. It's an island. And either Sony Japan or their english speaking CEOs haven't noticed that the EU has disabled borders between all those tiny (or not so tiny to allow for more nitpicking) countries and it's customer hostile to have content restrictions based on those borders.

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?

Media (music, film, TV, app) content licenses are country specific. Apple is relatively good about providing global access to purchased content. Amazon alters the list of available titles based on client IP/VPN geolocation. Some streaming vendors entirely block client devices based on IP/VPN geolocation.

To nuance, the Kindle store is more open than any of the stores I know of. As long as the account is created on the right country store, Amazon won't care about a real address or the credit card's country and will allow for digital purchases of any content available.

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.

They also allow country changes with content retention.

It is a MASSIVE pain in the ass to go through this process.

Kobo/Rakuten doesn't care either FYI.

baby shark

I always keep two sets of Apple devices with separate accounts for this reason :(

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.

You can log out of your US account in App Store, login with your other country account, download the app, then log out and log back in to your US account.

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].”

> What it actually means to say is..

Good use case for Apple Intelligence: pick the best customer-authored translation of incoherent error messages and display in an optional overlay.

Android/GrapheneOS allows multiple profiles per phone.

Apple could do the same, with sufficient internal or external motivation.

Yeah but then maybe families will maybe only buy one iPad instead of maybe buy multiple so it's not happening.

Apple can charge $$$ for each extra profile:

  - 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

As AI advocates say, more efficiency leads to larger markets.

Ignoring customer needs via artificial inefficiency leads to stagnant growth.

The EU is somewhat trying to kill this at least. It is very annoying.

https://ec.europa.eu/commission/presscorner/detail/es/ip_24_...

Depends on what it is. Apps absolutely shouldn't be geo-blocked. While I agree that other media shouldn't be geo-blocked, it's more to do with distribution rights and licensing deals and isn't really something Apple can solve for directly, save to support banning the practice in the EU. The EU needs to focus on Hollywood for movies and the music industry to deal with that.

Yeah, I'm more talking about the credit card discrimination specifically. I have an Apple account for Ireland that I can't add my German credit card to. Although I would love the EU to enforce a singular EU media distribution region / market somehow.

this! especially because lots of their content doesn't have audio on a specific language unless it's bought in that country's iTunes store.

Indeed, and they recently blocked the workaround I was using, namely: e-mail aliases are no longer allowed.

It worked! I haven't felt this thrilled with an Apple update since my iPad Pro became powerful enough to run a calculator!

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!

I think I have 4-5 accounts (including one using a friend's old Californian street address so I could access US-only apps that weren't available in Australia at the time), so I'm very keen to try this.

Edit: "Make sure both accounts are set to the same country and region for purchases." Arghh!

I imagine cross country purchase transfer would be a nightmare to implement or the purchases would be multi-region to start with. My ideal world would be if region locks were just banned, but instead each country/media outlet is just adding restrictions to what citizens can access.

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.

> Make sure both accounts are set to the same country and region for purchases

This is a setting nowadays, meaning that you can now change that for any account now. I have done that a few times already.

What happens to your purchases in a different country?

Those stay, in my experience so far.

Be warned: I migrated an old Apple account to my main Apple account and my “Continue Watching”/Watchlist in the TV App got totally cleared. It also forgot every Apple TV episode I have ever watched.

Super frustrating and it won’t let me undo the migration right now either.

An update on this: I tried undoing the migration the next day, and it worked! Everything on my main account was restored, including the TV app’s 'Continue Watching' and Watchlist feeds. Kudos to Apple—the undo function actually worked, which was a pleasant surprise.

Finally! No more going to the ancient account to restore some really old purchases. Now, not sure if I should keep separate accounts still for different countries. I know you can access the store from another country, but the switching is cumbersome compared to just logging in with it; some apps like one of my banks, just don't publish their app on countries where they don't operate, and when the autoupdate fails with the default login, I just use input the other one and it gets the update from the correct store.

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?

Weird that it's not available in the UK - it would have been nice to do this!

Also European Union and India!

I'm in the exact same situation as John Gruber:

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.

If only Google would follow suit. As it is, you can't even change your Google Account's main email address if it's Gmail. "The address used to identify your Google Account to you and others. You can’t change this address."

For those who might wonder how one gets into a situation where they need this, here's one way that a large number of people have run into.

• 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.

I can’t believe it’s happening after 17 years…

I tried to do it last night, and it said one of my accounts was ineligible. Didn't say which one, or why it was ineligible. I got on a live chat with Apple Support... for 2 hours. Surprisingly, the dude had already been very very trained on the ins and outs of the migration process. He knew everything.

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.

You basically described my account/family topology, and my concerns, to a tee. This sounds messy and I think I'm on the wrong side of the risk vs reward curve for now, perhaps I'll revisit in another year or two.

Thanks for taking the time to write this up.

> You can’t migrate purchases if both the primary Apple Account and the secondary Apple Account have music library data associated with each of them.

Is this not a severe restriction? (I am unsure as I am not entirely sure I understand what it means.)

One other case is how to de-buy an app. I have free apps that I am no longer interested. I don't want it is listed under my account anymore.

Yeah i want a way to hide some apps from the appstore purchase list (and unhide). It just gets more and more unweildly.

Apple Support: Hide purchases from the App Store

https://support.apple.com/en-us/108091

Is there an easy way to find a list of your purchased apps?

https://support.apple.com/en-us/118212

Why would you need an Apple account to control your possessions? In a sane world you just owned them even after you cut ties with the original vendor.

Is this just an advertisement, or do I miss the techy/interesting part which usually justifies posts on this platform?

> techy/interesting part

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43020838

I wouldn't have posted that if their solution/workaround had been the post.

This post, though...pure ad.

It has been a pain point for 20 years, with no official solution until now. No techy workaround can beat Apple eliminating the longstanding inconvenience.

Apple should publish a blog post on why it took 20 years to fix :)

Reply on news.ycombinator.com