There are purchased items on the iPhone “X’s iPhone” that have not been transferred to your iTunes library. You should transfer these items to your iTunes library before updating. So how about a clue as to what's not transferred and how to?

That's good to know, Mr. Kellett, and I am grateful for your effort to figure this out. However, there's a low probability that I will know it when the next upgrade comes out. Till Apple fixes this bug, I'll probably just go ahead like I did before and upgrade without regard to my failure in transferring (whatever that means) those mysterious purchases.

Clearing up this issue a little. By default the iTunes UI defaults having the menu bar hidden. Un-hide the menu bar by selecting the drop down button in the very top left corner of the application and select "Show menu bar", or you can press CTRL+B. Only then can you select "File" from the once hidden menu bar and select "Devices" and then "Transfer purchases from xxxxxxxx".

Thankyou very much for the solution i kept getting the "there are purchased items on the iphone that have not been transferred"error and your advise worked bang on! Thanks again,you've certainly helped this old man out.........................Dave.😀

I tried everything that was suggested and I am still getting the error. Not sure if apps or songs are missing ... I called Apple and they were not able to resolve the issue on the phone ( ! ). I do have 2 Apple IDs (US and French stores) and I did authorize my laptop under both IDs.

I am left with having to go back to the store and see someone in person. I will report on the results ...

Thank you!! This totally worked for me. I had 53 items to transfer apparently.

I think I finally made this go away. The only thing extra that I did was to "Unhide" an app that I had hidden in the iTunes store. The interface is really obscure, hidden in the iTunes store.

If you go to the "Purchased" link on the iTunes home page (NOT the "Purchased" item in the sidebar -- these show two completely different lists/user interfaces, despite being named the same!) you will see all the items you've ever purchased--except that when you hover over one of these items a little 'x' icon will be overlaid on it. If you click it, the item goes into a "hidden" list and will no longer show up here.

To see any items you might have hidden, go to your Account page (using the Account link on the iTunes home page, or selecting Account from the drop-down menu that appears when you click your Apple ID in the upper left corner). If you have any hidden purchases, you will see an entry in the "iTunes in the Cloud" section reading "Hidden Purchases:", with a "Manage" link. Clicking on Manage shows all your hidden purchases, subdivided into tabs for Music, Movies, etc. Tab through them all and if there are hidden items, click the Unhide All button in the bottom right corner. Also note that the Apps tab is further subdivided into iPhone and iPad sections.

I don't know for sure if this was the key to getting things to work, but I do know that after doing this the problem went away for me. After unhiding the app, I did another Transfer Purchases and this time a completely different app - in fact, Garage Band, which I hadn't hidden, transferred from the phone to my Mac.

I started the iOS update again, and the message did not appear. I think what might have happened was that the app I had hidden had, for some reason, never actually been transferred from the phone to the Mac at the time I hid it. I don't know where Garage Band fit into things... maybe there was just some corrupted DB entry that got cleared when I unhid everything... hard tellin', not knowin', as my grandpappy would have said.

Anyway, HTH. PS, I have to say, I agree with all the posters who wonder why syncing doesn't count as a "transfer"...

I finally did the OS update *from my phone* and I didn't get any of the errors about transferring purchases (but it doesn't make me feel better). I do have purchases from 2 stores and Apple employees tell me that they are merged and I just need to enter the appropriate ID/pwd to authorize updates. Apparently it's not that smooth when you have to perform an OS update.

I talked to a support agent as i had this problem earlier. Open iTunes, click iTunes>Preferences>Store then check Music & Apps under Automatic downloads. This fixes the problem!

<<File>Transfer Purchases>>

It is File > Devices > Transfer Purchases from....

It appears to me that Transferring Purchases is completely pointless. I declined to transfer purchases with the last os update, and I seem to have lost nothing except the waste of time in performing the transfer. Caveat: I seldom buy music from the iTunes Store, and I generally eschew anything from the App Store that requires a payment, so your mileage may differ (though I doubt it will).

I can't make the error message go away. I have "transferred purchases" multiple times. The first time I did it, something actually transferred, but every time since then, nothing gets transferred (or nothing displays as transferring.) Yet when I try to take a backup, I get the error again.

Under iTunes>Preferences>Store, I have Music, Apps and Books all checked as Automatic downloads.

I haven't done any IOS upgrades since last October, because every time I have tried to upgrades since IOS7, my phone gets bricked and I have to go through a LOOONG process with Apple to get my phone restored. So, I've lived without upgrades, but I really think I should get this one. But I think this "transfer purchases" is what is causing my upgrades to not work.

Anyone have other ideas?

scrappychic: YOU ROCK! Doesn't make sense to me, but it worked.

For those of you suggesting a simple, File>Devices>Transfer Purchases, yes, that's the simple answer to this problem, but even after doing that, many of us are (were) still experiencing the same error message. (I too have had 3 different Apple IDs on 3 different continents and am not convinced the 3 areas are fully merged...) If it still wasn't working for me, I'd certainly be investigating how to get a list of the untransferred items, and the thread about "hidden" items was interesting, but nothing showed up as described in my account page.

Good luck to the rest for which scrappychic's solution doesn't work!

Nothing here worked for me, including scrappychic's fix. But earlier posts about Transferring Purchases eventually led me to a fix for my situation.

I noticed that even when I repeatedly did a Transfer Purchases, it kept transferring the same one item (in my case, the Chrome browser). I looked up Chrome in the App Store in iTunes on my Mac and the Purchase button was an Update button. I updated the Chrome app in iTunes on the Mac, and then I was able to do an iOS update without seeing the, "There are purchased items," warning.

So for those of you unable to fix this with the other methods described, do a Transfer Purchases and see if you can catch the name(s) of what's being transferred. It's possible that simply updating those specific apps in iTunes on your Mac (or PC?) may suffice.

Thanks -- this worked for me, once I found from the posts below that it's actually File > Devices > Transfer Purchases.

Thank you SO MUCH! I'm not one who knows much about how to use computers, and I GREATLY appreciate your clear instructions about how to deal with the error message! I also completely agree with your suggestions about how Apple could make this problem go away! It's been a long time since your post - obviously, and unfortunately, Apple isn't listening to it's users.