Migrate purchases from one Apple Account to another (opens in new tab)

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.

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)

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!

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.

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!

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 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 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.

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

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?