Apple now lets you move purchases between your 25 years of accounts – Ars Technica

Now we can all bring that mandatory U2 album back into our main libraries.
Last night, Apple posted a new support document about migrating purchases between accounts, something that Apple users with long online histories have been waiting on for years, if not decades. If you have movies, music, or apps orphaned on various iTools/.Mac/MobileMe/iTunes accounts that preceded what you’re using now, you can start the fairly involved process of moving them over.”You can choose to migrate apps, music, and other content you’ve purchased from Apple on a secondary Apple Account to a primary Apple Account,” the document reads, suggesting that people might have older accounts tied primarily to just certain movies, music, or other purchases that they can now bring forward to their primary, device-linked account. The process takes place on an iPhone or iPad inside the Settings app, in the “Media & Purchases” section in your named account section.There are a few hitches to note. You can’t migrate purchases from or into a child’s account that exists inside Family Sharing. You can only migrate purchases to an account once a year. There are some complications if you have music libraries on both accounts and also if you have never used the primary account for purchases or downloads. And migration is not available in the EU, UK, or India.The process is also one direction, so you have to give some real thought to which account is your “primary” account going forward. If you goof it up, you can undo the migration.An Apple account has been many things over many years, and some people have ended up with an array of cloud account complications. Some might have one account for iCloud and its subscriptions and another for App Store or iTunes Store purchases. Others might have simply divided home and work accounts but now find the account-switching annoying. Writer John Gruber has a tale of bifurcated Apple accounts that goes back to January 2000, or the early days of iTools.The list of things you need to do on both the primary and secondary accounts to enable this migration is almost comically long and detailed: two-factor authentication must be turned on, there can be no purchases or rentals in the last 15 days, payment methods must be updated, and so on. It speaks to how many tiny eyeholes Apple’s infrastructure engineers had to weave this migration tool through and how many different kinds of Apple cloud history you can have at this moment.Ars Technica has been separating the signal from
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Source: https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2025/02/apple-now-lets-you-move-purchases-between-your-25-years-of-accounts/