ADAM ENGST 12 February 2025

Don’t miss the sight of pigs soaring majestically above the snow-covered peaks of Hades: Apple has published a support article explaining how to migrate apps, music, movies, TV shows, books, and other digital purchases from one of your Apple Accounts to another.

You can choose to migrate apps, music, and other content you’ve purchased from Apple on a secondary Apple Account to a primary Apple Account. The secondary Apple Account might be an account that’s only used for purchases. You’ll need to know the primary email address or phone number and password for both accounts, and neither account should be shared with anyone else.

We’ve been asking for this capability for decades, as Glenn Fleishman did in “Apple ID Becomes Mac OS X and iCloud Glue” (8 September 2011). Put simply, it might be welcome if you have long used one Apple Account in Settings and System Settings for iCloud and other key features but another for Media & Purchases.

Purchase migration isn’t available to users in the European Union, the United Kingdom, or India, likely due to legal, financial, or data privacy regulations. However, for Apple users throughout the rest of the world, it’s an answer to “Why can’t I merge two Apple Accounts?” that we never thought we’d get.

Ironically, when Tonya and I were testing Apple Invites last week (see “Streamline Event Planning with New Apple Invites Service,” 4 February 2025), she experienced some confusion because her everyday Apple Account is tied to a rarely used mac.com email address rather than her primary email address. Attempting to respond to an invitation with her primary email address led her down a rabbit hole when she discovered it was linked to another unused Apple Account, likely created decades ago for testing purposes. “If only you could merge the two,” I joked, never realizing it would become possible just days later.

In reality, migrating purchases from one account to another is not the same as merging accounts. Apple specifies that iCloud data, account balances, and personalized recommendations in Apple’s media apps won’t transfer from the secondary account, and you won’t be able to edit any App Store reviews created with your secondary Apple Account. Other users have noted that TestFlight betas also don’t transfer. Apple doesn’t mention in-app purchases, so while it seems logical that they would transfer, if they’re important to you, perhaps hold off until more information becomes available.

Rather than detailing the migration process, I recommend that you read Apple’s documentation, which is highly detailed, extremely specific, and full of caveats. It explains why you might want to migrate purchases, who can migrate purchases, what to do before migrating purchases, how to perform the migration, what happens when you migrate, why migration might fail, how you can undo migration, and the consequences of undoing migration.

Be sure to read everything carefully if you’re considering migration. In particular, be aware that after migration, the secondary account can no longer be used for Media & Purchases unless you explicitly undo the migration. And once you undo a migration, that account can’t be migrated again for a year, so you don’t want to goof around. I also recommend waiting a few weeks to increase the likelihood that Apple has fixed any bugs that might affect you.

It’s slightly odd that you can initiate migration only from an iPhone or iPad, but Apple is undoubtedly betting that almost everyone in this situation will have an iPhone or iPad along with a Mac. It makes sense to reduce the chance that the feature could cause problems on the Mac when relatively few will need it at all, and almost no one will use it more than once.