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by AnonC 492 days ago
I’ve been one of those people with one account for media, purchases and subscriptions and another one for iCloud. The purchases account, referred to as secondary in this document, is shared with family members (i.e., they use this same account and credentials for purchases too). Family members in turn have their own individual iCloud accounts.

I’ve never tried doing Family Sharing with this setup because it seemed confusing — it wants to use the iCloud account as the primary one whereas I’ve always added credit to the purchases account (taking advantage of some Apple Store Code discount offers).

Now, I have some credit balance on my purchases account, but I do see the “Migrate Purchases” option in settings even though this document says it won’t be available until I:

> Spend any balance remaining on your secondary Apple Account.

If this is enforced during migration or prevents me from migrating, I’d have to wait for a year or so to use up that balance. Apple really should’ve included account balance transfer as part of the migration.

To add to this mess, I actually have two purchases accounts across two different countries (i.e., one purchases account for one country and another one for a different country). I’ve only purchased free items in one of those accounts. This works, with some inconvenience, while I don’t touch my iCloud account at all.

I’m really interested in getting this sorted out (using one account per family member and using Family Sharing), but it looks like I may run into more problems.

If anyone here did read all the way till here, I’m open to suggestions on simplifying this as well as warnings and gotchas.

4 comments

Maybe the balance transfer has some regulations and rules with fraud because it's "money"?
Ditto. I used a Coinstar machine earlier this year to convert a few years worth of coins to Apple gift cards, but I accidentally redeemed the cards to my Apple "Media & Subscriptions" account. Now I've got about $140 there. My Apple One family subscription will use it up soon enough so I set a reminder to migrate purchases in a few months.
> I’ve never tried doing Family Sharing with this setup because it seemed confusing — it wants to use the iCloud account as the primary one whereas I’ve always added credit to the purchases account (taking advantage of some Apple Store Code discount offers).

I'm deep in the Apple ecosystem and yet this - what you speak of - is precisely why I will never try to really exercise any Apple software.

The company finds it impossible to do anything as simple and helpful as draw a system diagram of (say) laptop, phone, cloud, and their mirrorings, and their backups one to another, and their basic interactions.

To take the most obvious example, the precise workings of iTunes - even at the level of user visibility - were always a mystery, and shall always remain so, even in their subsequent reincarnations.

It seems pretty likely that they block transfer of accounts with a balance to reduce the likelihood of fraud from account reselling. There may also be tax implications.

Yes, they could find ways to mitigate that and could even transfer purchases without balance. But it is worth considering the anti-fraud angle.