Apple adds new requirement for migrating purchases between accounts

Earlier this week, Apple made a lot of longtime App Store customers happy. After years of asking for a way to merge Apple accounts, Apple released a tool enabling the ability to move purchases from one Apple account to another Apple account. The only catch? There are a lot of requirements that each account must meet.

Apple lists these reasons for purchase migration not being available:

• Neither Apple Account can be a child account created through Family Sharing.
• Neither Apple Account can already be used for migrated purchases. Learn how to undo a migration of purchases. If you undo a migration of purchases from a secondary account, you won’t be able to migrate purchases again for 1 year.
• 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. Learn about Apple One and iCloud storage.
• If your primary account has never been used for purchases or free downloads, you can’t migrate purchases.
• You can’t migrate purchases from an Apple Account that’s been deleted or deactivated.
• You can’t migrate purchases if your Apple Account is locked or disabled. Learn what to do if your Apple Account is locked or disabled.
• Neither Apple Account can be receiving any special access to apps or content. For example, an Apple Account enrolled in the VPP program through an employer to receive special access to apps.

However, early users of purchase migration also realized that TestFlight adds another hitch. For example, if you beta-tested software assigned to your Apple account used for purchases, access to those apps will not transfer to the Apple account that received your migrated purchases.

For that reason, Apple has added a new requirement before migrating purchases becomes available on your Apple accounts.

You can’t migrate purchases if your secondary Apple Account is used with TestFlight for testing beta versions of apps from a developer. Open TestFlight and select Stop Testing for each app to remove it from your account.

Apple has also updated its support document for purchase migration between Apple accounts to clarify that the 15-day purchase rule only applies to two markets:

In South Korea and China mainland, you might have to wait up to 15 days for all of your purchases made using Apple Account balance to completely process.

The document previously omitted mention of South Korea and mainland China.

Lastly, Apple has added this clarification to the Family Sharing segment of the document:

You can still migrate purchases if you previously designated your secondary account as a different Apple Account to share purchases for your primary account in Family Sharing.

Have you tried migrating purchases between Apple accounts yet? For me, the migration failed due to not meeting one or some of the requirements, although the system doesn’t specify which error needs to be resolved. As of this morning, the option to attempt a migration is no longer available for my account — even after leaving each TestFlight app.