In early June I finally decided to address an annoyance I had since I moved to London. I took my Apple ID I used in the US and ported it over to the UK. The final straw for me was that I wanted to try out Apple Music (again). Since when I tried it out originally and now they decided to play nice with Amazon Echo’s. That was one of the big reasons not to sue the service. Then I remembered I could not use Apple music the way I wanted to if I switched between Apple IDs to download stuff. Previously I have had to switch between my US and UK accounts on my IOS devices. Lots of things I have were tied to what was my US account. I did not want to use it for new stuff since I wanted to be using UK app store. Every time you switch App Stores on IOS I would lose my downloaded music if I was not logged into the store and had my Apple music account tied to it. That was one of the major drivers for switching to Spotify in the first place.
The hold up for me switching was I had subscriptions that according to Apple’s knowledge base I needed to wait to cancel before I could move. I also wasn’t sure what was really going to happen to all my stuff. After using the UK store more I was pretty confident but not 100% the most of what I had would be working fine. I just was not sure what was going to happen to my photos and I cloud when I switched over.
Since the longest subscription I had wasn’t expiring until next February I decided to call Apple and see if there was anything I could do. After speaking to one person I got escalated to someone else. She asked me to just switching countries to see the error I would get. When I called I was planning on just asking some questions and have the conversation be a mainly academic one. I figured it would be information gathering. On some level I was not ready to pull the trigger. Talking to the lady on the phone gave me some confidence so I took a leap of faith and tried to make the switch. There were one or two challenges that she addressed however surprisingly within 30 minutes my account was moved over to the UK app store.
Prior to the move I had to break my family share with M. Setting that back up and confirming everything had moved was pretty straightforward and didn’t take anywhere near as long as I thought it would.
The only hiccup I had was some odd errors on my iPhone related Apple music that didn’t exist on any other device. A day or two later or reboot or two later the issue is fixed. I’m not sure really what resolve the problem.
My iCloud data and photos seem to have seamlessly moved over. I spot checked one or two applications I purchased and they also seem to be working just fine. I haven’t bought media from the Apple store and I do not know how long so I am not that worried about any of that not working. I have long since been buying music from the Amazon MP3 store when I bought music. Now I mainly use spotify or other streaming services. I never really did download many TV shows or movies and what we have was for when the girls were much younger so I’m not worried if some of it’s not available.
I know at some point many months from now there’s going to be some gotcha that I didn’t realize until then. For now I was impressed with how seamless the switch was. Many of the reviews online talked about horrific experiences making the change. I am only assuming that in recent years Apple made it easier to do this.
The next thing I have to address is that I still have another UK Apple ID where I have a subscription. I have one software subscription tied to it. I get a good deal on it having previously bought the app before they went to s subscription model. I am not sure how to transfer that over to my main Apple ID. Of course I’m not sure if it matters that separate other than it being a moderate nuisance.
I also have to set up a new US Apple ID in case there is one or two things that I cannot get in the UK app store. There already is one free app that annoyingly is not available. That’s a minor inconvenience though. All in all one major technical debt issue I had from moving to England is now solved. It only took me 2 1/2 years to have the courage to try it.