9 ms·

How to manually merge two Apple IDs to one (2020)

123 points by js2 5y ago

Dylan16807 5y ago
What a nightmare! Spoiler: it's not a merge, there is no way to merge, only a thousand things to copy and reconfigure
- beermonster 5y ago
  Yeah, it's more of a manual merge.
somebodynew 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    "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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    Why not just download the songs from iTunes Match, then reupload after the switch?
    - madeofpalk 5y ago
      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.
    - bellyfullofbac 5y ago
      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 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.
  - fumblebee 5y ago
    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.
- robertoandred 5y ago
  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.
- PostThisTooFast 5y ago
  BS. Apple created this scenario for millions of people by suddenly requiring that Apple IDs be E-mail addresses. Then they made it even dumber by requiring that the E-mail addresses actually function. Requiring people to use an E-mail address as their user ID isn't just amateur-hour and a monumental security blunder; it's also a giant pain in the ass. As usual, Apple doesn't fix the problem by reversing its blunder. Instead, Apple doubles down on it and huffily refuses to provide any solution to the problem it created.
arthurcolle 5y ago
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.
- dmckeon 5y ago
  then delete A1, surely.
  - arthurcolle 5y ago
    there's a lot of content on A1 that was bought and purchased over the last 15 years or so!
    - frabcus 5y ago
      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.
      - arthurcolle 5y ago
        Surely our elected officials will deliver.
  - arthurcolle 5y ago
    I just noticed what you were saying - yes lol, delete the account that you've migrated stuff off of. Good catch, too many numbers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCud8H7z7vU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCud8H7z7vU
swiftcoder 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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.
  - somebodynew 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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)
techsupporter 5y ago
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.
tzs 5y ago
> 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 5y ago
  @me.com, not @mobileme.com. But yep.
- indemnity 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    > 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.
- 5y ago
headmelted 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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.
forgotmypw17 5y ago
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.
- nuker 5y ago
  Do you honestly think Android and Google are better?
  - forgotmypw17 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      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.
skinkestek 5y ago
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 5y ago
  I wonder if contacting Apple to adjust the age might work
techbio 5y ago
It just doesn't work. Try reading the help forums again.
ipython 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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 5y ago
      [deleted]
    - 5y ago
arthurcolle 5y ago
"$AAPL stock rises 2.69% after-hours after HN post reveals the depth of effective vendor lock-in, inability to merge accounts."
mmastrac 5y ago
> 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.
slad 5y ago
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.
plank_time 5y ago
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.
adambatkin 5y ago
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.
- Terretta 5y ago
  It’s possible to merge these. Support can do it as a one time thing. You have to get past triage “support”, past scripted support, to a fully empowered support level person.
nihilius 5y ago
I have a problem where I can’t find a Solution. Maybe anyone here has an hint for me. I had an selfhosted owncloud carddav server wish dosent exist anymore. I used it for my contacts on my iPhone. These are now only stored locally but still internally in the owncloud account. When I delete the old owncloud carddav server then the iPhone will delete all contacts. I tested it when I bought a new iPhone and after setting it up with a transfer of all data I tester it on the old phone before I resettet it. I want to migrate my contacts to iCloud but I can’t find a clean way for doing this. Every app I testet messed up some aspects of the contacts. Mostly the picture or custom fields. Does anybody has a hint for me how I can comfortably and error free migrate away from this non existent owncloud carddav to icloud? Thanks in advance. :)

123 points by js2 5y ago

Dylan16807 5y ago

What a nightmare! Spoiler: it's not a merge, there is no way to merge, only a thousand things to copy and reconfigure

beermonster 5y ago
Yeah, it's more of a manual merge.

somebodynew 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  "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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  Why not just download the songs from iTunes Match, then reupload after the switch?
  - madeofpalk 5y ago
    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.
  - bellyfullofbac 5y ago
    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 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.
- fumblebee 5y ago
  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.
robertoandred 5y ago
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.
PostThisTooFast 5y ago
BS. Apple created this scenario for millions of people by suddenly requiring that Apple IDs be E-mail addresses. Then they made it even dumber by requiring that the E-mail addresses actually function. Requiring people to use an E-mail address as their user ID isn't just amateur-hour and a monumental security blunder; it's also a giant pain in the ass. As usual, Apple doesn't fix the problem by reversing its blunder. Instead, Apple doubles down on it and huffily refuses to provide any solution to the problem it created.

arthurcolle 5y ago

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.

dmckeon 5y ago
then delete A1, surely.
- arthurcolle 5y ago
  there's a lot of content on A1 that was bought and purchased over the last 15 years or so!
  - frabcus 5y ago
    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.
    - arthurcolle 5y ago
      Surely our elected officials will deliver.
- arthurcolle 5y ago
  I just noticed what you were saying - yes lol, delete the account that you've migrated stuff off of. Good catch, too many numbers. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCud8H7z7vU https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dCud8H7z7vU

swiftcoder 5y ago

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 5y ago
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.
- somebodynew 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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)

techsupporter 5y ago

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.

tzs 5y ago

> 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 5y ago
@me.com, not @mobileme.com. But yep.
indemnity 5y ago
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 5y ago
  > 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.
5y ago

headmelted 5y ago

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 5y ago
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.

forgotmypw17 5y ago

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.

nuker 5y ago
Do you honestly think Android and Google are better?
- forgotmypw17 5y ago
  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 5y ago
    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.

skinkestek 5y ago

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 5y ago
I wonder if contacting Apple to adjust the age might work

techbio 5y ago

It just doesn't work. Try reading the help forums again.

ipython 5y ago

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 5y ago
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 5y ago
  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.
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arthurcolle 5y ago

"$AAPL stock rises 2.69% after-hours after HN post reveals the depth of effective vendor lock-in, inability to merge accounts."

mmastrac 5y ago

> 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.

slad 5y ago

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.

plank_time 5y ago

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.

adambatkin 5y ago

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.

Terretta 5y ago
It’s possible to merge these. Support can do it as a one time thing. You have to get past triage “support”, past scripted support, to a fully empowered support level person.

nihilius 5y ago

I have a problem where I can’t find a Solution. Maybe anyone here has an hint for me. I had an selfhosted owncloud carddav server wish dosent exist anymore. I used it for my contacts on my iPhone. These are now only stored locally but still internally in the owncloud account. When I delete the old owncloud carddav server then the iPhone will delete all contacts. I tested it when I bought a new iPhone and after setting it up with a transfer of all data I tester it on the old phone before I resettet it. I want to migrate my contacts to iCloud but I can’t find a clean way for doing this. Every app I testet messed up some aspects of the contacts. Mostly the picture or custom fields. Does anybody has a hint for me how I can comfortably and error free migrate away from this non existent owncloud carddav to icloud? Thanks in advance. :)