Screenshot/Graphics: Apple/Rajesh Pandey
In a move unlike Apple, it is finally allowing you to transfer your digital purchases across Apple Accounts. The company has released a tool and published an extensive support article detailing the steps.
There are several conditions and requirements, with the migration option not available worldwide.
Transfer your Apple account purchases to a secondary ID
For years, Apple did not provide a way to migrate your purchased apps and digital content from one account to another. This forced many users to re-purchase the same content again from their secondary ID. But that’s changing now, as Apple is officially making it possible to migrate your digital purchases to a secondary account.
The first thing to know is that you can only migrate apps to a secondary Apple Account used only for purchases. Both the primary and secondary accounts must not be shared with anyone. Additionally, you must have access to the email ID and password for both accounts.
Another restriction is that you must set both accounts to the same country and region.
As part of the transfer process, you must verify the payment method associated with the secondary Apple ID.
There are a lot of restrictions
Apple notes that the migration feature is not available to users in the European Union, United Kingdom, and India. There are several other cases where you cannot migrate purchases between your primary and secondary Apple IDs. Some of them are as follows:
- None of the Apple accounts can have a child account created through Family Sharing.
- None of the Apple accounts should have been used for purchase migration previously.
- You can’t migrate purchases if both the primary Apple Account and the secondary Apple Account have music library data associated with each of them.
- You can’t migrate purchases if you’ve set your Apple One subscription to provide iCloud storage to a third, different account
- You can’t migrate purchases from a deleted or deactivated Apple Account.
While you can undo the migration of your digital purchases, you cannot migrate purchases again for a year after that.
You can follow the steps on Apple’s support page to migrate your digital purchases from one Apple account to another.
