So of course people thought that when they changed jobs, cable companies, or whatever... they needed to create a new Apple ID with their new E-mail address. This was reinforced when Apple further stupidified their policy by requiring your ID to be a WORKING E-mail address (originally it didn't actually have to work).

After the outcry over people's App Store and other purchases being scattered across multiple IDs, Apple finally publicly and huffily declared that they weren't going to fix the problem they created by letting people consolidate accounts.

The moral: Don't force people to use E-mail addresses as user IDs. It's stupid on several levels.

They somewhat changed that. It now is possible to move purchases between accounts. See https://support.apple.com/en-us/117294. Looks quite cumbersome to do, and will not apply to everybody (“If an Apple Account is only used for making purchases, those purchases can be migrated to a primary Apple Account to consolidate them.”, “This feature isn’t available to users in India.”)

The real downside is if you have two fully active Apple IDs. Then things like calendars, photos, email, etc are still stuck on the other account until you export it. Which can be a pain since you have to sign out of your main account, sign into the old account and export, then sign back into the main account.

I haven't transferred the purchases or anything either. The two Apple IDs have different purchases on them, and those on Family Sharing are able to access both.

I use both for quite a few things. Which one is "primary?"

“At the time of migration, the Apple Account signed in for use with iCloud and most features on your iPhone or iPad will be referred to as the primary Apple Account.

At the time of migration, the Apple Account signed in just for use with Media & Purchases will be referred to as the secondary Apple Account.”

⇒ apparently you can be signed into multiple accounts at the same time ¿but I guess with only one account per feature?

But as I said, that page is badly written. So, maybe I’m understanding it wrong.

Yes... because of the mess Apple made, I am always signed into two accounts. My non-E-mail one for all purchases, and the E-mail one for iCloud.

This belief is rampant amongst 90% of the general public. I had to spend an hour helping a friend last week who had created a new Cash App account to do their taxes, because they didn't prefer the old email address that was on their longstanding Cash App account. So now they have to keep 2 Cash App accounts forever. And to make things more fun, they're obsessed with phone numbers there, so adding the phone to the second account pulls it off the other account.

Oh, and digression but I have to vent: their login process on the web is, in some order: an SMS to your phone, another numeric to your email, and your password. All in succession, on every login.

This is also why using E-mail addresses as user IDs is monumentally stupid: People will think that they need to use their E-mail password, too. So now any entity with this ID policy becomes a gatekeeper not only to their own site or service, but the user's E-mail account.

One poor security regime or disgruntled employee at one obscure Web site can now enable identity theft on a grand scale, by exposing E-mail addresses and passwords.

There's a reason that banks and brokerages don't employ this ignorant policy. It's disappointing that Apple set such a poor example by implementing it. Then they had to run around trying to mitigate the harm with 2FA and other measures, after high-profile "hacking" attacks on journalists and celebs.

I basically need two Apple IDs because switching the region for your App Store is very inconvenient if you have any subscriptions.

In the end, I have separate Apple IDs for each country.

I traveled to Australia and got a local SIM. Suddenly every incoming call was from an unknown caller, even though every one was in my address book. Apple is too stupid to handle international calling in the 2020s. I mean... WTF?

Then again, this is the same company that "helpfully" changes all your calendar appointment times when you travel to a different time zone... with NO WAY TO PREVENT IT. So if you go east, you're going to miss any events you set up in advance... including flights home.

Ironically they then relented only for India and China because market share too sweet, so all auth developers now need to update the assumption that Apple auth users have an email address. Worst of both worlds :)

I suppose those mail services were "cloud"...

However, for your purpose of avoiding Apple's capricious BS, I probably wouldn't go that route since if their braindead fraud systems or braindead employees decide you're a threat actor they could definitely default to "Ban account. Find all their evil backup accounts that have the same phone numbers or contact emails and ban them too."

When encountering this, I updated the device which bricked the appstore, the device has to be fully reset if that happens.

Is there any evidence of this happening with an actual legitimate gift card and bot one which was stolen or originally purchased via credit card fund.

When Cyberpunk 2077 came out, my wife bought it with her credit card and gifted the game to me. It was fine at first. I even managed to play through the game. However when coming back to the game a few months later (to see all the bugfixes), it was gone. I contacted the (gog) and they said it was removed due to automatic fraud detection and that the balance had been paid back to the original credit card (my wife's card, she had obviously not noticed this in her bank statement).

Point being automatic fraud detection systems can wipe out stuff you purchased even months after the fact (or in some cases lock your account)... It feels kafkaesque.

Incorrect, the milk does not disappear. You are contractually and legally obligated not to drink the milk, much in the same way I should not go around killing people, but I certainly have the ability to.

Now, if you sell the customer electrically locking milk bottles which won't open after the contract is over, then the customer "can't" drink the milk, they couldn't.

I don't dispute that GOG has the right, from a strictly legal standpoint, to revoke a license for any reason their terms of service allow, and that someone continuing to play a game after their license was revoked would be in breach of contract. What I do dispute is that this is a correct, fair, or desirable state of affairs, especially when the license in question was received as a gift and believed in good faith by the recipient to have been acquired non-fraudulently.

And in particular, if GOG wants the absolute and irrevocable right to prevent consumers from using products for which GOG has decided to revoke the licenses, they shouldn't advertise themselves as a DRM-free platform, nor claim that "Here, you won't be locked out of titles you paid for, or constantly asked to prove you own them - this is DRM-free gaming." -- advertising copy may not have the force of law, but courts tend to take a dim view of ad claims that are provably false.

[0]: the list price of the Cyberpunk 2077 Ultimate Edition on GOG as of this writing (though it is currently on sale for 38% off)

If you buy milk from the supermarket and they reverse the transaction 2 days later claiming you used a fraudulent card, but you didn't use a fraudulent card, you have the right to keep the milk and the loss of money is the store's problem.

> The card was purchased from a major brick-and-mortar retailer (Australians, think Woolworths scale; Americans, think Walmart scale)

This is the important quote showing that the gift card was not legitimate.

apple recommended they only buy gift cards from apple, but they still sell them in stores...

obviously money is more important to them than the consumers but pretending apple have zero responsibility is silly

It was locked for less than a week.

>but they still sell them in stores

Unfortunately there are sketchy resellers that exist too.

For Apple to say "Don't buy gift cards from our authorized retailers, or prepare to face incredibly harsh consequences due to fraud that you can't detect or predict" while continuing to sell them through those channels is morally bankrupt and completely unacceptable.

I have no doubt fraud is a big problem. It is for all gift cards. But this is a 3 trillion dollar company -- and they make minimum 30% of every gift card sold in pure profit. If they can't secure those channels without torpedoing innocent customers' entire digital lives, they need to drop that channel.

If somebody bought something from Walmart you wouldn’t insinuate he’s at fault because he bought it from a ‘sketchy retailer’. Just stop it lol. There is literally no way to defend Apple on that one.

If unknowingly using a stolen gift card just meant you lost your money, nobody would be complaining about Apple's behavior here. The issue is that they didn't just lose their money, they also got their account locked, which locks up a lot of stuff completely unrelated to gift cards.

Our victim was the victim of the only theft that involved the gift card. Then Apple stole the person's whole digital life with no recourse because they are ham-fisted and don't care.

i would be surprised if there's any company with millions of users where .01 or .001 (still a LOT of users) just get screwed with zero recourse

https://hey.paris/posts/appleid/