Transfer purchases to another ID

Having a family with 3 people and each having 2 apple id's each (problems with accessing original accounts) I know the pain of having to purchase content a second time.

All I want is to be able to merge two ID's that I can prove I own.

My email account that is my iTunes account got hacked and I created a new email and thus a new iTunes account. Is there a way of transferring purchases from my old account to my new account cause I will be deleting my old email ASAP. Thanks.

Again, you cannot combine or transfer purchased between accounts. You are better off changing the contact email in your itunes account by following the instructions here: http://support.apple.com/kb/ht1918

Let me be the next to ask Apple, and it's content creators, to re-think this policy. Many people, like me, buy Apple products for their children or spouses and use their own Apple IDs to buy content for them either because they are too young to have their own Apple account or to save them the complexity of the management of same.

Until Apple creates a better linked or "parental" account system, perhaps skin to an improved Xbox Live model, they need to provide a way of, when your children get older, setting them up with their own account and then splitting up the assets from what was being used as the "Master" account, so that they can then have all the content that says purchased for them over the years. I'm not talking about having multiple copies afterwards, I'm talking about a true transfer.

My $0.02 of common sense.

@TampaCraig, reportedly (and unfortunately, ironically, and perhaps counterproductively), actual Apple personnel neither moderate, review, nor retrieve comments from these support forums. So I have been told, and a great many others even in this thread been told, by authoritative-sounding persons of high "Level" in response to questions. So, your best bet, I'd guess, is to truly post feedback to Apple via a feedback page. The master page seems to be http://www.apple.com/feedback/ and I'd guess the appropriate sub-page would be http://www.apple.com/feedback/itunesapp.html.

Or, perhaps contacting Apple Legal would be of some use: http://www.apple.com/legal/contact/. I truly don't know if they (or anyone else at Apple) cares. Responses to your 2¢ here, though, at least to the extent that they are not subsumed in a request for advice on using the existing hardware, software, SaaS, and stores and account management tools, will generally be met with haughty disdain, at best. Such 2¢ are, actually, violations of the ASC TOS/TOU (although, strictly speaking, so is explaining why). Going straight to the perhaps-useful feedback pages may save you from accusations of piracy or (worse) theft or "stealing."

Oh, and don't mention the war!

Until people quit buying Apple devices, Apple does not have a reason to change things; ie: transferring apps to a new account (not to pirate) that you have. When Apple's devices start losing out to Android, Windows, etc, then Apple will change.

and you wonder why people jail break their phone.

Which all are free to do, it's your phone. But there is also a dark side to that freedom. Which is why the survey results of who exactly is jailbreaking their phones tells us that it is the young hackers mostly. Those accustomed to to living on that techy edge. Those more likely to have the ability to recover if things go tragically wrong.

Perhaps you could let your younger brother, son or nephew j-break yours! Good luck with that. YMMV.

no I jail break my own phone.... the point is I buy something and I wnat to move it to my wife ipad or my kids that should be up to me.

It is up to you. You are free to share your content with anyone who lives under your roof who also has an iOS device. You just need to authorize that device to use your content. So if you have installed your content in the iTunes library on a Mac or PC and have authorized that computer for your content, then any device that you sync to that computer can use your content. What you cannot do is buy content with your iTunes Apple ID and later transfer ownership of that content to someone else's iTunes Apple ID, the Licensed Copy End USer License Agreement, which you agree to when you buy the content, does not allow it.

Co-mingeling different Apple ID's on a single i-device is possible in theory, in practice it doesn't always work or at very least you run the risk to potentially create issues such as the "connect to itunes to use push notifications" error in which the iPad 'gets confused' about ID tokens and consequently confuses individual applications to a point that this error continously pops up making the app useless. Only way to solve the issue is to clean wipe and restore the ipad and to re-install all purchased apps ... And by doing so quite possibly re-corrupting the ID tokens because you are using several ID's.

Welcome to the vicious cycle I am facing.

And I'm not even starting to think about the "fun" I'm having with me and my partner constantly having to log in and out of different Apple Id's just to accomplish mundane tasks such as updating apps.

So in essence even if in theory you are able to share hardware - in practice, through Apple's ID issues, you cannot do so with iDevices, at least not seamlessly. Sort of softly forcing users to buy an idevice for each user...

And yes you could also create a family-ID but again no one told me or others that there are going to be issues in future - and frankly my Apple ID is older than my current relationship - I only met the love of my life 3 years ago. I owned an idevice since the first ipod and certainly got an Apple ID when the first iPhone came out. You do the mth.

Unless you're a clairvoyant you cannot forsee these things!

Clearly, from a user-interface perspective, Apple's EULA is a broken system that requires fixing as so many have pointed out.

I have a related question I have an iPhone 4s and 5 an ipad and ipad mini I want to get them all on the same apple id at the moment the ipad and and the 5 have he same I'd but the mini does not which was a mistake by myself. Now I have apps I bought for the ipad and face having to pay for them again to put on the mini. Is there a legal way round this?

No. Apple does not merge IDs or transfer content from one ID to another.

Actually what you want to do is fine.

You simply need to setup the Mini with the ID that you now want it to have, and then all the Apps from that ID become available to it to be downloaded for free.

Now, if you downloaded Apps with the ID currently on the Mini then those will still be available to it, but will require that other ID to update.

If you haven't downloaded anything with the Mini's Apple ID, your best bet, is to simply Wipe the Mini and start over. When you set it up again, choose the option to use an existing Apple Id, and input the data for the Apple ID you now wish to use.

Basically changing the Apple ID used on a device is fine. Transferring content between different Apple IDs is not permitted nor possible at this time.

To change the Apple ID of the Mini you can go to Settings->iTunes & App Stores -> Apple ID ->Sign Out.

Then Sign in with the other one. If you decide to download Apps onto the Mini with the Apple Id from the iPhone 5 , you will potentially lock the Apple Id that's currently on the Mini for 90 days.

To Wipe the mini and start over:

Settings->General->Reset->Erase all Content & Settings.

it would be nice if Apple did change their policy to allow same-household-family-members to switch/transfer purchases between different apple ids. Wishful thinking 🙂