Migrate purchases from one Apple Account to another

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.

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

• 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.