You Can Finally Migrate Purchases From Your Old Apple ID | Here’s How It Works

Apple has finally solved one of the most frustrating problems faced by its most loyal customers. Starting this week, folks who have more than one Apple Account will be able to consolidate their purchases into a single account.

While this may not sound like a big problem for anyone who has joined the Apple ecosystem more recently, many long-time Apple users who have been around since the days when the iTunes Store was the iTunes Music Store found themselves stuck with an older Apple ID they’d set up exclusively for buying music, movies, and TV shows from iTunes.

Two decades ago, most folks had an account with Apple solely to make purchases from iTunes. While Apple had its “dot Mac” service in that era, it was primarily aimed at Mac users. For most people, creating an iTunes Store account with whatever email address they already had made more sense than signing up for a mac.com email address (not to mention this was a paid service back then).

The App Store and MobileMe didn’t arrive until a year after the iPhone launched, and MobileMe continued to be a paid subscription service. People who already had iTunes Store accounts stuck with those for the App Store, and even many new iPhone owners eschewed MobileMe.

By the time Apple launched iCloud in 2012 as a free service it already had millions of users with Apple IDs tied to their other email addresses. Those could be used with iCloud, of course, but many folks took the opportunity to sign up for a new account with a free iCloud.com email address, leading to a scenario where their purchases were stored in one account and their data was stored in another.

It’s such a common problem that Apple’s operating systems have always allowed you to sign into different Apple Accounts on the same device: one for your purchased content and subscriptions, like Apple Music, and another for your iCloud service (you can also sign in using separate accounts for FaceTime, iMessage, and Game Center).

This allowed users who still have all their purchases under a non-iCloud account to access those purchases and keep using them to download new apps and content while having their iCloud.com account for Apple’s cloud-based services. It was a slightly messy solution, but it worked reasonably well.

Still, for years, many Apple users petitioned Apple for a way to let them consolidate those purchases into their primary iCloud account. It seemed like a simple thing on the surface, but Apple’s digital plumbing is likely complicated by decades of legacy code (remember, the iTunes Store launched in 2003), so it never seemed to provide any solutions for this, forcing folks to continue using a split-account configuration.

John Gruber has a great post explaining this common problem over at Daring Fireball. While he stuck with the two-account setup, I recognized about 12 years ago that I’d likely never be able to consolidate my purchases into my MobileMe account (for which I had scored an excellent three-letter username before the @me.com domain) and just resigned myself to using my primary email address for iCloud and effectively abandoning the other Apple Account.

How to Consolidate Your Purchases

I should have never said never, as Apple has finally provided a way. In a new support document published on Tuesday, Apple has unveiled a method to solve this problem and let users consolidate all their purchases into a single account.

Note that this is a very specific solution for a unique problem. It won’t let you move purchases between accounts at will. Rather, it’s designed to move everything purchased by one account into another as a one-time thing, so it won’t help when you’re breaking up a family group and want people to take some of their purchase apps and other content with them.

Essentially, this is a consolidation of accounts and not just purchases. Apple lays this out as a scenario where you’re migrating a “secondary” account (the one used to make purchases) into a “primary” account (the one you use for iCloud and other services on your iPhone). Here are just a few of the things to keep in mind:

1. The migration will move all payment methods from the secondary account to the primary account — replacing the ones on your primary account.
2. All purchases and subscriptions will migrate, so you’ll have to cancel the ones you don’t want to keep.
3. All profile and personalization features in Apple Music, Apple TV, and Apple Podcasts will migrate from the secondary account and replace whatever is in the primary account. This includes things like your Apple Music Replay, Up Next queue in the TV app, and Podcast library.
4. iCloud data and personalized recommendations from the App Store, Apple TV app, Apple Books, and Apple Podcasts won’t migrate. You’ll be starting fresh with personalization on your primary account.
5. You’ll no longer be able to edit App Store Reviews posted with your secondary account.
6. The secondary account will effectively be disabled once the migration is complete.

There are also several requirements you’ll need to meet to make this happen:

1. Accounts must be set to the same country. You can’t migrate purchases between countries.
2. Both accounts must have two-factor authentication enabled.
3. The secondary account must have a zero balance.
4. There must be no pending rentals or pre-orders on the secondary account, and at least 15 days must have passed since the last purchase was made.
5. The secondary account must have a valid payment method on file for verification purposes.
6. Neither account can be a child account created through Family Sharing.
7. Neither account can have been used to migrate purchases before. This is a one-time feature intended to help solve the two-account problem. It can’t be used to consolidate purchases from multiple accounts.
8. Only one of the two accounts can contain an Apple Music library.
9. Your primary account must have been used for at least one purchase or free download.
10. You can’t migrate purchases from an Apple Account that’s locked, disabled, deleted, or deactivated.
11. Neither Apple Account can be set up for special access, such as an employer’s VPP program for deploying apps.
12. This feature isn’t available in the European Union, UK, or India.

As long as you’ve met the conditions above and you’re signed into different accounts under iCloud and Media & Purchases in your Apple Account settings (accessed by opening the Settings app and tapping your name), you should see a Migrate Purchases option under Settings > Apple Account > Media & Purchases. Tap this to start the process and then follow the instructions to complete the migration.

Going Back

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It’s possible to undo a migration if you change your mind, but this is a slightly messy process that won’t restore everything to quite the way it was before. When undoing a migration:

1. Payment methods will be removed from both accounts, so you’ll have to set them up again
2. All subscriptions other than iCloud+ will be cancelled. You’ll need to manually resubscribe to anything you want to keep.
3. Only purchases made before the migration will return to the secondary Apple account — those initially made with that account. Purchases made on the primary account will stay with the primary account.
4. If you undo a migration of purchases from a secondary account, you won’t be able to migrate purchases again for one year.

The good news is that the primary accounts Apple TV, Apple Music, and Apple Podcasts data will migrate back to the secondary account, assuming it came from there in the first place.

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