Apple Not Offering Apple ID Merging

In September, there had been some hope that Apple was working on a solution to allow users to merge multiple Apple IDs into one. The news came from an encouraging phone call from Apple's executive relations team saying that they were aware of the issue and seemingly working on it.

Now that iCloud has launched, many have been wondering if anything had come of the previous discussion. One reader emailed Tim Cook and received an official response. Apple is simply pointing users to a support document outlining your options for managing multiple Apple IDs. Unfortunately, merging is not one of the options.

Their recommended solution is, of course, to use the same Apple ID for both store purchases and iCloud. They also explicitly state that merging simply isn't an option:

Can I merge multiple Apple IDs into one? 
You cannot merge two or more Apple IDs into a single one. You can, however, use one Apple ID for iCloud services and another Apple ID for store purchases (including iTunes in the Cloud and iTunes Match). See “Using one Apple ID for iCloud and a different Apple ID for Store Purchases” above for details.

The document does outline the possibility to use one Apple ID for store purchases and another for iCloud, but that's as far as it goes.

Top Rated Comments

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EricNau

100 months ago

Unacceptable. It's Apple's flawed system that lead individuals to adopt multiple Apple IDs in the first place. Any MobileMe customer of 3 years has at least two: email@mac.com and email@me.com. Three if they had an Apple ID prior to joining (most probably did).

Apple employees, therefore, have at least four (their company email address). In addition to that, I had one given to me by iTunes Store support for iTunes, and one prior to the usage of email addresses (if I recall correctly, back then it was just a username, but later they required an email address which became your Apple ID).

At last count I have 6 Apple IDs. It's ridiculous. It's probably only a matter of time before Apple gives me another.

Rating: 14 Votes

pancakedrawer

100 months ago

I'm sure Apple will allow this in the future.
There are many people who signed up today and there will be more in the future now that we're over the disaster that was MobileMe.
Insisting that people keep their old gmail accounts going doesn't sound like it would fit well with Apple's idea of enhancing their ecosystem.
:apple:

Rating: 7 Votes

Mak47

100 months ago

My issue is simply that I'd like my @me.com email address to be my single Apple ID, instead of an old gmail account that I really no longer use.

Mail, contacts, calendars etc. all use that address as my iCloud account as of today. All the other one is for is for iTunes purchases.

While the current solution technically works fine, it just seems silly that Apple can't find a way to make this work. I can change my Apple ID in iTunes to a new email address if I want to with no trouble, why not my @me.com address?

Rating: 7 Votes

levifig

100 months ago

That's a really "old" article and no update has been made recently. That is the exact wording since I saw it the first time a couple of months ago, before rumors of merging were surfaced.

I don't care if Apple allows merging publicly but we testers had to create new IDs for iCloud pre-migration and are now stuck with two, unnecessary, IDs and some of us already paid for iTunes Match and storage upgrades :\

Rating: 5 Votes

ryan.stewie

100 months ago

I activated iCloud on my current gMail Apple ID but they won't let me change my primary login email to the new iCloud @me.com address, even though they are the same Apple ID! Ridiculous!

Rating: 5 Votes

alphaod

100 months ago

This is disappointing my MobileMe, iTunes, and Apple.com accounts are all separate. I would have liked to merge them into one, or at least have them linked in some way. I'm pretty sure linking should be easy; just look at all the other websites that let you link multiple aliases.

Rating: 4 Votes

roland.g

100 months ago

Apple in part created this problem with the .Mac -> MobileMe -> iCloud transitions.

I had an iTools account forever ago, free, that ended @mac.com and eventually became a pay for service called .Mac. This is since 2000/2001.

In 2002-2003 I even worked for Apple and had my .Mac account as my Apple ID as an employee. Then of course it was also my iTMS account. And then the transition to MobileMe began the confusion.

My email is me.com but I sign into Apple.com and iTS under mac.com still. They should have transitioned Apple IDs at that time and not just email addresses. The switch now to iCloud just clouds the whole thing even more and makes it more fragmented and frustrating.

Rating: 4 Votes

jonnyhart

100 months ago

My biggest ball ache is that I live in Finland and have 1 ID for the Finnish store, but also another for the UK store from when I lived there. There are some apps that can only be downloaded from each store and updates have always been a pain (having to log in under each ID for all updates to take place.) Now I have a fairly even split of apps belonging to each ID I can only see misery ahead. For example, yesterday I paid for and downloaded 3 magazines to my iPad using my uk ID. After updating to ios5 and signing in with my Finnish ID, those magazines are no longer available to me and by the time I can change and log in with a the UK account they will be out of date. Thanks. Why can't multiple ID's be associated with a single device? For the live of god, why?!

Rating: 4 Votes

cindyhy

100 months ago

Why do Apple refuse to do that? This problem has been bugging people (me included) for years. It certainly isn't a technical problem. So is it legal? Do they want to discourage people from getting multiple accounts? Why?:confused:

Rating: 4 Votes

John.B

100 months ago

Hint:

His initials are SJ. Widely known as a very brilliant yet self centered narcissist.

Never wrong, always right, with a proclivity to make sky high claims like "It's Magical & Revolutionary"

Highly revered, he was untouchable. The perfect human.

Oh, you mean the guy who pressured the record labels to remove DRM from music downloads? Effectively opening up people's iTunes libraries to be usable outside of iTunes, iPods, etc.? That guy?

Rating: 3 Votes

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