As many others I have two Apple-ID, one which I’ve used to pay for all apps, etc - let’s call this “Store account”. And one that I’ve used for photos, email, storage, etc - let’s call that “iCloud account”
My variant (as I understand it) is that the “Store account” is an old account with a non-apple email address, while the “iCloud account” uses an apple account with the name “jemostrom” - something I’m kind of attached to for obvious reasons.
It would be pretty easy for me to scrap the “iCloud account” and make the “Store account” my main and only account. The thing is that I want to keep the “jemostrom”. What happens if I delete my “jemostrom” account and then change the account name of my “Store account” to “jemostrom” … is that even possible (I suspect not)?
The Apple ID for an account can be changed. My wife and I did something like this for her Apple account. Here’s what you should be able to do:
change the current jemostrom account that you use for iCloud things to something else, a “spare” email account you don’t use for anything Apple related or even a free email account you create just for this purpose. This will make that name available.
sign out your “Store account” from various app stores
change the “Store account” Apple ID to jemostrom
sign into various app stores with your renamed “Store account”
switch all your iCloud settings to use the “Store account”
You may find at step 3 that “jemostrom” is not immediately available as an Apple ID, it will still say that it’s already in use by another account. In my experience, it was eventually recognized as being available and the change went through; I’m not sure how long one must wait, it might be more than one day.
I don’t recommend trying to get the old “iCloud account” completely out of your life, in case you later discover something is still associated with it. Keep its password (hopefully you use a password manager) and keep it associated with an email account you check.
If “jemostrom” is just the name part of a longer email address, you should be able to do that. But if the Apple ID is literally just the word “jemostrom,” I’d be surprised if you’d be able to switch that and make it the ID of your other account.
There was a time when Apple allowed you to choose an Apple ID that was just a word, rather than an email address. At some point, Apple started requiring an email address as the ID. That’s why I have two Apple IDs — I have my original, which is just a word, and I have the one Apple made me create when it started requiring a full email address, which is just my original ID with mac.com tacked onto it.
I believe I had the option back then to convert the single-word ID to an email address, but I didn’t understand the implications, so I chose to create a new ID and save the old one.
Is this true for Apple IDs like xxxx@mac.com? In the past, you weren’t able to change these whereas an Apple ID that’s a third-party email address could be changed.
In short, there is a section called “reachable at” that you can set for the Apple ID, and the Apple ID email address can be changed to one of those email addresses. For any of those addresses, they can only be changed to another @icloud.com, @mac.com, or @me.com address.