Any way to merge Apple Accounts?

TidBITS Talk
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I Have THREE Apple usernames since time began. :grin:
Does ANYONE yet know a trick to convert all these user names which have their own passwords into ONE???
What a great Christmas Gift that would be.
Patrick :christmas_tree:

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Unfortunately that is not yet something Apple supports. There may be legal reasons? For example, if you’ve purchased media with one account, perhaps they are prevented by contract from moving the rights to another account? But, that’s just guessing.

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Although many others have made that a Christmas wish for decades now, Apple has always said No Way, to all,

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4

Depending on what you are trying to accomplish, you might get close to your practical goal by setting up Apple’s Family Sharing feature. For example, if you want access to music, books, etc. purchased by those accounts all at once, Family Sharing may do the trick. It’s not as convenient as being able to merge accounts, but it may be worth looking into.

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Unfortunately, Apple apparently doesn’t have anyone competent enough to do this. It is basically a merging of two (or more) database entries but DOES require it to be done SECURELY.

To add insult to injury, while I ended up being required to create two Apple IDs, Apple has seemingly created two more WITHOUT my permission! I’ve just ignored those them.

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Yeah, that’s what I had to do. My first Apple account used my at-the-time employer’s email address which was used to purchase many iTunes songs. When I left, I created a second account with my personal email address and continued to buy iTunes songs before Apple started offering .Mac accounts.

While you can use 2 different accounts for iCloud and media, you cannot use more than 2. So now I have my original iTunes content back through Family Sharing. I DID have to create a Mac User Account for each of them so that I could sign in and accept the family sharing requests.

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It is not, and has never been, a matter of competence. It’s a matter of legal restrictions.

If you could merge Apple IDs, you could effectively transfer purchases from one person to another. Apple’s legal agreements with content providers forbid allowing any form of transfer. Hence, Apple IDs cannot be merged.

Dave

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Dave, we’re not talking about merging Apple IDs of SEPARATE people; we’re talking about merging those that BELONG to ONE person. That is NOT transferring content since the content STAYS with the SAME person! Treating my two Apple IDs as being assigned to TWO separate & distinct persons makes as much sense as saying “John P. Jones” & “John Paul Jones” are two separate and distinct people when it is the same person.

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Family Sharing sound interesting, but I have a couple of questions. Does family sharing work for non-Apple products and services? My wife has been having problems accessing my subscriptions to non-Apple web sites, which would be great. However, the only Apple service we use is iCloud, and we don’t want our photo files to be mixed together.

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It can be. It’s up to the app developer if they want to honor family sharing with subscriptions. It will say so in the App Store listing.

They won’t be. Each Apple ID gets its own photo library, but with iOS 17 and Sonoma Apple started offering shared libraries, an optional way to share some (or all) of your photos with other member of the family share. You’re not required to use it, but I have a shared library that my wife and I use , especially for vacation photos.

Unfortunately, you cannot share private photo albums this way, but share photo albums have long worked and still do.

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Thanks, that helps but does not answer a question that I failed to ask explicitly: can we sharing subscriptions that don’t go through the Apple Store, like mine to New York Times, which I bought directly from the publisher? I get all my subscriptions that way.

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You know that for sure. Apple doesn’t – and really, how long would it be before scammers used the loophole to transfer purchases?

In any case, the larger point remains: it’s not about Apple incompetence, it’s about their decision on how to uphold their legal responsibilities.

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Family Sharing only affects subscriptions that you purchase from Apple. So anything outside depends on the people who offer the subscription. Family sharing wouldn’t change any aspect of sharing passwords like that in any way.

That said - my wife uses my login for my NYT subscription and we’ve had no trouble with that. I just have that in the Passwords app using the family share so she can see it, and access the password if I change it for some reason. (I haven’t had to change that one yet, but Verizon just forced me to change my password yesterday when we were trying to set up my wife’s new cellular iPad mini :roll_eyes:.)

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14

IANAL…but I refuse to believe this is not an issue Apple could solve assuming they wanted to. The problem is they don’t want the hassle…and they made a corporate decision not to solve this problem.

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