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Apple Now Lets You Move Digital Purchases From One Apple Account to Another

Hard to explain why a company with 100k engineers isn't able to provide a reason for a failed migration.
Even better, do a check before the migration to see if the accounts qualify.

I'm only interested in transfer my apps purchased on the "secondary" account.
While I was hopping for this moment for a long time, it seems half baked.
I wished for an assistant-like transfer, where I can check *WHAT* I want to transfer.
No need to screw my Music or Podcasts libraries. No sense in this at all.
 
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kortenkamp said:
Finally. But why is this restricted to the US? Don’t tell me that GDPR prevents it in the EU.
So, please, Apple, let us Europeans do this, too.
Click to expand...
I’m assuming it’s somehow related to media rights, not the GDPR. Because that list of countries is very specific and India and the UK aren’t covered by the GDPR.
 
Parowdy said:
Doesn’t it work like that already?
I thought once my sister is 18 she can administrate her own account and use apps she „purchased“ even if family sharing is off. Or are you talking about something else?
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Oh, okay, you're probably right! I was imagining that because all purchases are paid from the 'Organiser's' credit card, that they belong to that person… but no, that wouldn't really make sense.
 
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It won't let me migrate and both accounts have 2-step verification.
 

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Wake me up when Apple allows you to change the birthday on a kid's account more than once in their life time... because you know, that's the only way to still "manage your kid's screen time" while they're you know.. STILL UNDER 18! 🙄
 
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A step in the right direction but doesn’t help me. After getting a divorce, I’d like to move the thousands of dollars worth of audiobooks that my now ex purchased from my account to hers. Its not a matter of one being primary and a secondary being moved into that one to consolidate, it’s a transfer of content that I don’t need or want to another account.
 
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GTDaveMac said:
https://twitter.com/x/status/1889525978566689071
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Christ, another half arsed implementation of functionality? They make things that unnecessarily complicated they probably don't even know how they work themselves (as seems to be the case with 1st and 2nd line Apple Support employees). I often feel that it's because everything is built on a very flakey foundation that keeps getting more and more stuff piled on top of it?
 
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It'd be nice to be able to split accounts, not merge them.

We bought a bunch of stuff for my kids, but my wife's appleid was the store id for them.

It'd be nice to punt that stuff into their own accounts. A lot of my purchases were also done with my wife's account. I can't remember why, but I was always too scared to switch to my own account, unsure of what would happen to those purchases.
 
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Can anyone who's doing this post a screen-shot of what the button/option actually looks like in the Settings panel on iOS? I updated to 18.3.1 this morning... went looking in the iCloud settings, but I don't see any option for this. And I'm in the US.

From Apple's instructions, it sounds like you need 2 distinct devices to simultaneously sign into the two distinct accounts — How does one accomplish this if they don't have two modern iOS / iPadOS devices? I only have 1 i-device in the house that can even be updated to 18.x, so am I unable to do this? I have an old iPad (from like 2013) that is still running iOS 9 or something like that... I don't think that device even allows 2FA, so I'm not sure it would be able to work that way.

I've long-since made my "old iTunes account" a family member, so that I could enable purchase sharing to get those apps on my i-devices & macs, but would love to have my whole app & movie list show up in one pane, going forward. Also have a few friends for whom this is a major annoyance too.
 
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  • 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.

I wonder what this means exactly 🤔
 
adingley said:
Can anyone who's doing this post a screen-shot of what the button/option actually looks like in the Settings panel on iOS? I updated to 18.3.1 this morning... went looking in the iCloud settings, but I don't see any option for this. And I'm in the US.

From Apple's instructions, it sounds like you need 2 distinct devices to simultaneously sign into the two distinct accounts — How does one accomplish this if they don't have two modern iOS / iPadOS devices? I only have 1 i-device in the house that can even be updated to 18.x, so am I unable to do this? I have an old iPad (from like 2013) that is still running iOS 9 or something like that... I don't think that device even allows 2FA, so I'm not sure it would be able to work that way.

I've long-since made my "old iTunes account" a family member, so that I could enable purchase sharing to get those apps on my i-devices & macs, but would love to have my whole app & movie list show up in one pane, going forward. Also have a few friends for whom this is a major annoyance too.
Click to expand...

Check the First Post with the Link to the Apple Support Document. You don`t need a second device.

  1. On your iPhone or iPad, open the Settings app.
  2. Tap your name, then tap Media & Purchases.
  3. Tap View Account. You might be asked to sign in.
  4. Scroll down, then tap Migrate Purchases.
  5. Review the information about both accounts, then follow the tasks to complete the migration of purchases to the primary account.
  6. When complete, you’ll see “Purchases Have Been Migrated”. The email addresses associated with both accounts will also receive a confirmation email.
  7. Be sure to check your Media & Purchases settings, sign out of the secondary Apple Account, and then sign in with the primary Apple Account.
Click to expand...
 
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Cruncher said:
I have exactly the same problem. All my apps are associated with my old account. I can`t redownload any apps. I asks me to login with my old account and then fails. I hope it just needs to
Click to expand...

I haven’t had to enter my secondary account password since it first asked me so it seems to remember.

If you can’t login to your old account, you can try offloading the app and downloading it again.
 
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I’m pretty sure I know why they added the ability to do this. Without migrating it’s impossible to manage your AppleCare+ subscription on device as it’s tied to your iCloud account and subscriptions are tied to the media account. As such if they are different AppleCare+ subscriptions don’t show up.

They worked around that by adding the ability to manage subscriptions to the Apple account web page a few months ago. I noticed today that the subscriptions page no longer exists on the web site.
 
thenahon said:
This is ****ing HUGE. We have been waiting over 25 years for this. I grew up using my mom's Comcast email for our iTunes account, then later changing that to my Gmail when I started paying for the family's purchases. When family sharing came about I had my own iCloud/Apple ID and this Gmail AppleID and had to juggle both. Finally, I can just have one Apple ID. Hallelujah!
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Same, and I can't tell you how many hours I have spent trying to fix various issues that came with having my "real" account and a separate "sharing" account that I didn't want in the first place. I hope this works, as my $10k of purchases was the only thing keeping me from jettisoning my otherwise unwanted "sharing" account.
 
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On the one hand, this features is YEARS overdue. On the other hand, could this be a precursor to Apple killing off the ability to use a secondary Apple account for purchases and forcing people to migrate purchases to their primary Apple account? I definitely do NOT want that to happen. For security reasons, I only use my primary Apple account with devices that support the latest OS updates. But I still use my secondary Apple account on (very) old devices (e.g., iPad 2) that I use for movies and music.
 
macloverwi said:
So i got the same error. Unable to Migrate Purchases. One or both accounts is not eligible for purchase migration. If I turn off family sharing…will I be able to easily set it up on the other account smoothly?
Click to expand...
I only just realised that I can't do this because I'm British, but that was may concern. When we're eventually allowed to do this over here, can I simply turn family back on and everything works again for all of them?
 
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