[HN Gopher] How to manually merge two Apple IDs to one (2020)
___________________________________________________________________
How to manually merge two Apple IDs to one (2020)
Author : js2
Score : 112 points
Date : 2021-07-11 00:36 UTC (22 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.brianstucki.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.brianstucki.com)
| somebodynew wrote:
| I agree with the article's conclusion that as bad as this manual
| merging process is, Apple trying to offer an automated account
| merge would be a nightmare.
|
| They don't provide any backwards compatibility when adding even
| minor new features to apps like Notes or Reminders that
| synchronize through iCloud. If you update your iPhone but not
| your Macbook, new notes created on the phone may be silently
| ignored on the Macbook, or mysteriously vanish into the void if
| you perform one of the bulk operations that replaces the
| canonical list of existing objects with the older software's
| limited accessible subset.
|
| I also know from experience that changing your Apple ID email
| address (which is permitted) will leave many iCloud services
| confused and trigger sporadic strange pop-up messages about your
| account status for years. I would not trust a merge button that
| needs to deal with disparate photo libraries (any of which may
| have existing byzantine compatibility baggage from the upgrade
| from iPhoto to Photos), Notes, Reminders, and all of the other
| services to leave a well-used account in a reasonable state.
| arthurcolle wrote:
| It's non-deterministic because they don't care about it,
| because caring about or not caring about it are treated equally
| - there are no forces that make them need to care. There is no
| profit motive. I have an iPad signed into an account I created
| on the fly to try to "start from scratch" - I didn't realize
| that there would be no way to have interoperability with
| another 15 year account I had with Apple. Of course, now that
| that's the case - I just have to deal with some nonsense
| restriction that's imposed because of some risk-averse lawyer
| sitting in a corner office.
|
| Glad I can still torrent movies, cheers to Bram Cohen for
| advancing the field and denting the absurd DRM culture that's
| developed.
| lozenge wrote:
| "caring about or not caring about it are treated equally -
| there are no forces that make them need to care"
|
| I find this assumption that large organisations like Apple
| are rational, perfectly optimised economic actors very odd.
| People would never apply it to a government but give it to a
| nepotistic dictatorship like Apple without a second thought.
|
| Apple has a culture problem re regressions which is only
| hurting them and not benefiting them.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| Two years after I moved countries, my credit card expired from
| my home country, so I wanted to use my new UK card, which
| requires changing your Apple ID country.
|
| Changing your Apple ID country requires cancelling all your
| subscriptions, including Apple Music, which deleted my entire
| music collection (even my previously uploaded iTunes Match
| library). When faced with the prospect of starting from
| scratch, i just moved to Spotify.
| cassianoleal wrote:
| Why not just download the songs from iTunes Match, then
| reupload after the switch?
| bellyfullofbac wrote:
| Man, that sounds like it would work, but what an annoying
| workaround for a stupid problem on their side - which I
| guess has to do with music licensing in different
| jurisdictions.
|
| Makes me think of this scene:
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyVZFm7P0CQ
|
| I was just going to make this comment, but it's funny how
| stuff "in the cloud" has jurisdictions. I'm reminded of a
| Saudi Arabian guy I sat next to on a plane from Austria to
| Turkey. He couldn't get iTunes on his iPad to play stuff
| because... he was in the wrong region. Serves him (and his
| girlfriend) right, they came on board the plane as the last
| 2 people carrying six large shopping bags as carry-ons.
| madeofpalk wrote:
| My fault, I just didn't think about the process that much -
| I wasn't thinking about "cancelling Apple Music", more
| about just changing card/countries. I figured it would keep
| my library around, just deactivated.
|
| I actually did end up attempting to restore backups where i
| had downloaded everything, but as soon as I signed in with
| my account it just deleted everything from my local library
| again.
|
| I had been using windows more and more and I didn't care so
| I switched to Spotify and am better for it.
| fumblebee wrote:
| I also had to change my Apple ID country once -- the system
| blocked me because I had credit left on my account after
| applying a gift card. The amount remaining on my account? 4
| cents.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| For the record, changing country on Spotify is fairly easy.
| You need to cancel your subscription and wait for your
| account to be a free one, then change your country and
| restart a new subscription.
|
| You don't lose anything because free accounts keep the same
| data.
| Flimm wrote:
| On Spotify, there is some music that is only available in
| some countries. But it's a small fraction of the music,
| probably less than 0.1%. When switching countries, those
| songs will be kept in your playlists even if unplayable,
| IIRC.
| benhurmarcel wrote:
| When changing country on iCloud, did you lose all your
| purchases (apart from subscriptions)? Like books, apps,
| movies...
| madeofpalk wrote:
| No. The only thing I lost was my entire music library. All
| other purchases remained, from what I can tell.
| greghinch wrote:
| I lost some but not most of my movies. Same for apps. Music
| was the worst, but on Apple Music so not purchases (just
| had to re-add a lot of things to my library).
|
| It has to do with how the individual content (film, app,
| song) is licensed. If the same content has a separate
| license in the new country, it won't carry over.
|
| Also note this means it will depend on the two countries
| you are moving between (ie. I went US > UK, and I would
| guess there is a lot more licensing crossover between these
| two countries, whereas two others may not have so much).
| Wowfunhappy wrote:
| And this is why I flat-out will not buy digital content
| unless:
|
| 1. It's DRM-Free.
|
| 2. I can remove the DRM. (All iTunes movies released
| prior to 2020 fall into this category.)
|
| 3. It's cheap enough that I can treat it like a rental; I
| fully expect to loose access after a few years and
| anything longer is a bonus.
| robertoandred wrote:
| That's why they warn you when you open Notes or Reminders and
| give you an opportunity to not upgrade so all your devices are
| compatible with each other.
| techsupporter wrote:
| Just FYI, since the author got close (Apple Pay and Apple Pay
| Cash), but didn't directly touch on this:
|
| For those who've signed up for Apple Card, currently Goldman
| Sachs (the bank that issues the Apple Card) does not permit
| moving cards from one Apple ID to another. The only way to "move"
| is to close the first card and reapply on the other ID, which is
| not a guaranteed approval.
| arthurcolle wrote:
| This is insane. I looked into this because I have a work (my own
| work) iPad and then my primary user account across like 5
| computers. Because they all have like 1-2TB of storage each, I
| havent found a consistent backup solution that makes sense in
| terms of price/convenience and I just manually backup like 1-50GB
| of "very important" existentially critically pieces of info.
|
| It should be very easy to merge accounts. Even a naive
| implementation could just modify references from
| account_you_dont_care_about (A1) to
| account_you_want_to_be_primary (A2) and then delete A2.
|
| Such a burden on the everyday consumer. Extremely, extremely
| frustrating. I understand why my parents and others in their
| generation feel confused by some nuances, because this is just a
| non-transparent, de-prioritized product goal that will never be
| improved. I hope we legislate this as part of the Right to Repair
| plan, it's adjacent.
| drivebycomment wrote:
| > It should be very easy to merge accounts.
|
| This can not be further from the truth. It is extremely
| difficult to do this. Anyone who says this is easy does not
| understand how difficult it is to do this across a modern
| distributed information system. Most services do not do this,
| because it is so exceedingly difficult, not because they don't
| want to.
| dmckeon wrote:
| then delete A1, surely.
| arthurcolle wrote:
| there's a lot of content on A1 that was bought and purchased
| over the last 15 years or so!
| frabcus wrote:
| I think the real answer is legislation to let purchased
| digital content get moved arbitrarily between accounts.
| This would also create a second hand market, which there
| should be.
| tzs wrote:
| > Like many long time Mac users, I had one Apple ID for iCloud
| and another one for iTunes. I can't remember exactly how this
| happened but I know I'm not alone.
|
| Here's a common way this happened.
|
| 1. You got an iTunes account first, _before_ the predecessor of
| iCloud even existed. The Apple ID this created was associated
| with your regular email address.
|
| 2. You got a .Mac or MobileMe account early on. Those originally
| required you to use an email address at one of the Apple-owned
| domains (@mac.com or, I think, @mobileme.com, and maybe one or
| two more). Thus you ended up with another Apple ID associated
| with that email address.
| comex wrote:
| @me.com, not @mobileme.com. But yep.
| h0nd wrote:
| For me the Apple ID has always been the one and only.
|
| What I got later on as an unwanted extra, was an @icloud.com
| email address that was linked with my existing Apple ID.
| jsjohnst wrote:
| That's exactly the order for me. My iTunes account was so old
| that it wasn't even an email address, it was just a username. I
| don't mind the two separate accounts for iCloud vs iTunes, but
| was annoyed when Apple aggressively started trying to force me
| to change away from a "username" to an account login based on
| an "email address". I finally caved and did it a while back,
| being told that I wouldn't need to re-login on every device,
| but that turned out to be a lie. I've also had to call Apple
| three times to get some kind of "security alert" cleared on the
| account (they seem to immediately know the issue and fix it
| quickly, but won't describe why it happens) following the
| change or otherwise I'm blocked from making purchases.
| scioto wrote:
| I got the iTunes account a long, long time ago. And then when I
| heard the @me accounts were going to go free, I got one so I
| could name-squat. And then when I totally drink the Apple Kool-
| Aid I find out that I can't merge the two accounts, even though
| I've changed the iTunes account email a couple times.
|
| So now it's a continuous exercise in trying to remember which
| account I use for what. Essentially, if it involves money, it's
| the iTunes account. Well, except to pay for the iCloud storage.
| Yeah, pretty straightforward.
| indemnity wrote:
| Yep. I've been trying to delete my @mac.com ID for years, for
| various reasons this is impossible (2FA, unreleased apps,
| etc.). It's one of the special ones where you can't change the
| email address you use to sign in with, you have to use
| @mac.com.
|
| Annoyed me enough that I burned 15 years of purchases and other
| history to start again from scratch on a new ID I control
| completely.
|
| But I can't get rid of the old one, and it has some link to my
| phone number due to it using 2FA which cannot be removed, since
| 2FA is a one way trip. Which confuses the hell out of the Apple
| Watch (No one can add me for activity sharing since I switched
| to the new Apple ID).
|
| And yes, every device under my control has been wiped and reset
| without a restore, no go.
|
| Hotel California...
| js2 wrote:
| > Yep. I've been trying to delete my @mac.com ID for years,
| for various reasons this is impossible (2FA, unreleased apps,
| etc.). It's one of the special ones where you can't change
| the email address you use to sign in with, you have to use
| @mac.com.
|
| This is no longer true. I was able to change the primary
| email address on my @mac.com account to my personal domain. I
| did this maybe a year ago. The @mac.com address is still
| associated as an alias I can't delete but it's no longer the
| primary address.
| slad wrote:
| I'm curious what email service you ended up using? I have been
| thinking to move out of gmail but it just feels like there isn't
| good free alternative and also task of changing email address
| everywhere seems like behemoth task.
| headmelted wrote:
| Not directly related to the article but the author posting on
| twitter that they want to move all of their accounts to one
| company seems like a terrible idea.
|
| Surely having multiple accounts is safer for both counter-party
| risk and insurance?
| blamazon wrote:
| The trade off is continuous low grade toil to maintain the
| multiple accounts. When you've hit the 6-person family limit on
| Apple ID family sharing, (as the author notes) toil has high
| cost.
| ipython wrote:
| On a similar note, my daughter and I share an iTunes account so
| she can have access to apps and music I purchased. She has her
| own Apple ID for iCloud.
|
| One day, I receive a password reset notification for my personal
| Apple ID. I freak out, as I now have lost access to my Apple ID
| and imagine any moment now the attacker will wipe my devices.
|
| Turns out my daughter was unable to download an app, so she went
| through (successfully) the password reset flow for _my_ Apple ID!
| It's definitely not obvious, but apparently you can reset the
| credentials for someone else's Apple ID if that id is used for
| iTunes and the App Store on another device.
| defaultname wrote:
| Your daughter has and uses your Apple account, and you're
| surprised that she can reset the password? I'm really confused
| by this story, much less how Apple is in any way to blame or
| this is at all surprising.
|
| As an aside, what you described is serviced by Family Sharing
| now. I have my wife and my four kids in my Family -- literally
| and from an Apple account perspective -- and they all have
| access to my purchases (and each others, unless the product
| specifically forbids it which is rare), my Apple One Premiere,
| etc. It's a wonderful system.
| ipython wrote:
| Apple family sharing didn't exist when I started using the
| ecosystem and last time I tried using family sharing
| exclusively it wouldn't share the purchased music and apps
| from my account with the other family members.
|
| The behavior is confusing because there are two accounts on
| the device - her personal iCloud account and the App
| Store/iTunes account. One would assume that the password
| reset would reset her iCloud account and not the App Store
| account. Or at least I would have received some sort of
| notification on _my_ devices which are logged into the iCloud
| account that a password reset is attempted.
|
| I'll agree that the situation is not ideal, but Apple has
| made the whole experience a big mess.
| [deleted]
| js2 wrote:
| Only your devices should be logged into both accounts (your
| iCloud account and your iTunes account). You can then use
| family sharing and purchase sharing to share from the iTunes
| account to all of the accounts in the family.
|
| None of your family members should be logged into anything but
| their own iCloud accounts.
| adambatkin wrote:
| This article misses out on one of the most important things,
| something that CAN NOT be moved: Purchased apps.
|
| Somehow, I have two different Apple accounts. Both are tied to
| the same e-mail address (which _should_ be impossible, and in
| fact, if I try to edit the profile of one, it complains that I
| can't do that since the e-mail address is already in use). This
| means that whenever I want to set up an iDevice, I need to log in
| to one account, download all the apps I want from there, then
| switch the App Store to the other account, and download the rest
| of the apps.
|
| Of course, Apple support told me to pound sand. But at least they
| were friendly about it.
| skinkestek wrote:
| I'll have to do something similar for my daughter who has an
| account which claims she is a few years older than she actually
| is and who now wants to be part of the family group with a child
| account.
| rovr138 wrote:
| I wonder if contacting Apple to adjust the age might work
| swiftcoder wrote:
| Fun times. I fought a version of this battle when Apple merged
| developer accounts into the general Apple ID - my developer
| account used the same email as my apple ID, but for some reason
| they created a new apple ID during the merge, so I had two
| different apple ids attached to the same email address...
| x0x0 wrote:
| I -- and I know how unlikely this sounds, so maybe this is how
| it happened...
|
| I have an apple account with two different passwords. That work
| simultaneously, but on different services. The only way I
| figured this out is I evolve passwords with a numbering scheme;
| I kept forgetting the password, resetting, and incrementing a
| counter. I slowly realized I wasn't forgetting; it's that I had
| multiple passwords live.
|
| I tested this as recently as 2 months ago.
|
| The internal architecture that makes this possible... I assume
| it's why the phrase "swallows sadness" was invented.
| swiftcoder wrote:
| Yep. After fighting this situation for about a year I leaned
| on Apple support and they were able to merge the accounts
| (unclear if they were generally willing to do that, or I just
| got lucky and assigned a friendly CS agent).
| lostlogin wrote:
| No one believed me when I said this happened, and further
| password resets tidied it up and I decided I was just wrong.
|
| It seems I wasn't.
| somebodynew wrote:
| This is actually possible for Gmail as well, although they
| have a UI for it. I discovered this when I tried to log in to
| an old business account on a custom domain (say,
| admin@example.com) and received a prompt to the effect of
| "The account admin@example.com is associated with both a G
| Suite Mail account and a Gmail account." with a list view of
| (two) accounts to choose from.
|
| My conclusion at the time was that someone had associated a
| paid individual Gmail account with admin@example.com using
| the custom domain feature, and later created a G Suite
| account with the same name.
|
| I have no idea how they decide which account (or both)
| receives an incoming message as I only had the password for
| one of the two admin@example.com accounts.
| mattzito wrote:
| There's actually no such thing as a paid gmail account
| separate from a g suite account- there is only gmail.com
| (consumer) and @domain (paid g suite/workspace). But it may
| be possible that you or someone else created a Google
| account for admin@example.com, and then separately
| provisioned a g suite account for the same address with a
| different password. This is not at all uncommon, as lots of
| people sign up for a Google account with their work email
| address for use with search and YouTube and so on, and then
| later their employer switches to Workspace for email and
| suddenly there's all these conflicts. There is a process
| for merging and claiming these, but I don't remember how it
| works off the top of my head.
|
| But to answer your implied question - there are two
| accounts, but only one mailbox. If you chose to log in to
| the Google account, you would not have access to gmail.
|
| (Source: work on workspace@google. Obviously only my own
| opinion)
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| I recently realized that, with me using my Apple devices less and
| less frequently, and having abandoned all of Apple's services
| long ago, I no longer remember my Apple ID password.
|
| I still occasionally use one iPad for testing on iOS 7 Safari,
| and when the surprise unprompted prompt for the password
| appeared, I realized this. Of course, I clicked Cancel. There's
| one less bullshit service to submit to.
|
| It's a great feeling.
| hellbannedguy wrote:
| I could give up Apple completely, except for their phones, and
| the Ipad.
|
| I will probally live long enough to see a better phone than
| Apple.
|
| It's the Ipad that companies need to jump on. There just isn't
| any real competition. The head of Amazon's fire devices shouid
| be fired immediately. They get it wrong in every aspect, with
| every new devise.
|
| (I am glad Apple takes security very serious, and kicks out
| questionable apps. I could care less they take 30% for the
| right to get on their platform. That piece if mind is worth
| paying more.)
| nuker wrote:
| Do you honestly think Android and Google are better?
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| In my experience, yes.
|
| I can load .apk files directly onto my device, without using
| Google Play Store, which is optional.
|
| An Android device has NEVER locked up on me, demanding
| "activation", which then makes me wait 10-20 seconds before
| timing out and not working. (Happened two different devices,
| and that's just recently, and one I was not able to recover.)
|
| I can install different versions of Chrome, Chromium, and
| even non-Google browser distributions and engines like
| Bromite, all independent of the OS. Bromite is the only
| mobile browser I know which has a "View Source" command in
| the menu. (No, adding "view-source:" to the beginning of the
| address bar using kludgy cursor control and text entry, is
| NOT workable.)
|
| I can even get a command prompt with a GNU/POSIX environment
| and bash.
|
| And I can sort-of kind-of access the file system with a whole
| array of different tools.
|
| All on every stock device I've ever tried. I recently
| rediscovered a 2013 device with Android 5.0.1 on it, and I
| was able to install the latest Bromite on it. It's now my
| daily driver.
|
| I would say that's not just better, that's MUCH better.
| nuker wrote:
| Google business is built on using your data, it is truly an
| Ad company, while Apple is not. And common perception of
| Android as open source, it is not. Google Play Services
| runs all the time and is closed source.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| I'm not sure what you mean by that, but it doesn't change
| how useless Apple devices are to me.
| nuker wrote:
| I meant Privacy, it is important to me.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| If I only use a non-Google web browser and don't sign
| into Google's services, where are the privacy leaks?
|
| Are you aware that Apple is capable of browsing the
| entirety of your iCloud backup data?
| nuker wrote:
| > Apple is capable
|
| See my previous reply, they are not in Ad business, they
| make money on devices.
| salamandersauce wrote:
| They are in the ad business. They're just not as
| successful as Google. For example they sell ads for App
| Store searches. They used to run an ad network called iAd
| for use in iOS apps but it just wasn't successful so it
| was discontinued.
|
| Apple makes money on devices, but they also make
| boatloads on selling apps, subs and micro transactions in
| the App Store such that they have incentives to keep that
| as closed as possible to keep consumers going through
| them and only them for mobile software needs.
| nuker wrote:
| All that you said just confirms they don't need or use
| _users_ data. Closed, yes, but I feel safer this way, I'm
| a consumer, not developer.
| forgotmypw17 wrote:
| Someone else locking up and managing your data for you is
| great until you want something not in the playbook.
|
| I'm sticking with text files and such, which I can manage
| myself.
| Anunayj wrote:
| Yeah Stock Android might not be that privacy friendly,
| but it being opensourced means I can use something like
| AOSP if I so may desire and sideload all apps I need. For
| me, control over my devices is more important. I do not
| want to trust the words of a random company.
|
| Ofcourse there are a few issues with this approach, it
| reduces the security of the device (Unlocked firmware),
| Some apps depend on Google Play services and will refuse
| to run, (usually it's the games depending on Google Play
| Games). And using any Google Service (gmail, youtube)
| _requires_ me to install google play services. (Which
| honestly defeats the whole prupose). Apple 's ecosystem
| is quite "nice" and just works out of the box and they
| have shown themselves to be trustworthy in the past. I
| just don't want to be locked to their ecosystem.
| mod50ack wrote:
| I use Fennec F-Droid with a custom addon collection for
| true extensions on Android. (There is a view source one,
| btw, and I now have an entry for it in my menu.)
|
| While I have used custom ROMs before, this is all on a
| stock ROM Android phone. Any can do it. That's the beauty
| of it.
| jsjohnst wrote:
| > I can load .apk files directly onto my device, without
| using Google Play Store, which is optional.
|
| For several years now, you've been able to sideload apps on
| an iPhone using a free developer account. Yes there are
| caveats, but those caveats have 3rd party MacOS apps to
| smooth them over.
|
| > is the only mobile browser I know which has a "View
| Source" command in the menu
|
| There's iPhone apps which add an extension to MobileSafari
| so it becomes essentially a menu item.
|
| > I can even get a command prompt with a GNU/POSIX
| environment and bash. And I can sort-of kind-of access the
| file system with a whole array of different tools
|
| This exists too on iOS. The app is called iSH and is
| available on the AppStore. It's not full filesystem access,
| but neither is your solution from the sound of it.
| Talanes wrote:
| >For several years now, you've been able to sideload apps
| on an iPhone using a free developer account.
|
| Android doesn't require a specific machine to be able to
| side-load. Plenty of people only own an iPhone and no
| other part of the Apple ecosystem, so they effectively
| cannot sideload.
| mod50ack wrote:
| iOS sideloading is awful. What if you don't have a Mac?
| What if you need to spend a week away from yours? What if
| you want to load something and forget it? There is
| nothing like F-Droid on iOS, and there never could be.
| Granted, this affects enthusiasts more than the average
| user, but it's still a key difference.
|
| At least you can use extensions on iOS Safari now. This
| is a major step forward from when I last used an iPhone
| (iPhone 6 before I switched to Android). On the other
| hand, you cannot switch rendering engines (as I have, to
| Gecko with Fennec), nor is there likely to ever be a way
| to install an extension such as "Bypass Paywalls Clean",
| which I have in Fennec --- an essential for me, among a
| number of other great FF extensions).
|
| As for iSH, I again must commend Apple for a step
| forward, as there was no way this would have been allowed
| a few years ago. It's true that it runs in emulation
| rather than natively as Termux does, but still, not a bad
| step. (Termux, btw, can be allowed to access any of the
| user files, but can't touch the root fs on Android
| without rooting.)
| arthurcolle wrote:
| "$AAPL stock rises 2.69% after-hours after HN post reveals the
| depth of effective vendor lock-in, inability to merge accounts."
| mmastrac wrote:
| > I have found no way to move a purchase history over to another
| Apple ID. I'm still working through this one. I'm hoping to find
| a friend of a friend that can move things over for me.
|
| Yeah, that's what we need government intervention to fix.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| What a nightmare! Spoiler: it's not a merge, there is no way to
| merge, only a thousand things to copy and reconfigure
| beermonster wrote:
| Yeah, it's more of a manual merge.
| plank_time wrote:
| Somehow I have a different App Store account than my iCloud
| account than my Apple ID account. And I have some music from my
| older App Store account that I don't want to spend hours and
| possibly corrupt my newer App Store account with. It's a big mess
| and honestly I can't remember ever making a decision to use
| different accounts. It just kind of happened.
| techbio wrote:
| It just doesn't work. Try reading the help forums again.
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