Migrating Purchases from One Apple Account to Another Is Now Possible

Yesterday, Apple published a support document explaining how to migrate purchases from one Apple Account to another for users everywhere except the EU, UK, and India. This process solves a very particular problem for users who have separate Apple Accounts for digital purchases across Apple’s storefronts and want to consolidate everything under one account, which Stephen Hackett recently went through.

I’m in the same boat. I started buying music from iTunes on a Windows PC for an iPod before I owned any other Apple products. Those purchases were linked to one email address. Later, when I got my first Mac, I got a .Mac email address, which became a MobileMe account and, finally, an iCloud account. That left me with an iCloud account for iCloud services and a different address for my music, movies, TV shows, apps, and other purchases.

I’ve gotten used to the process of signing in to different accounts for iCloud and my purchases, but every now and then, it causes some hard-to-troubleshoot conflict somewhere. That’s why I’m glad to see there’s now a process for moving everything to one account. However, having also lived through many iCloud headaches over the years, I think I’ll wait a while before attempting a migration. iCloud is one area where being an early adopter doesn’t always pay off.