Apple ID Opening a second Apple ID with another country/region

[Marcus777]

Hello guys,

The title says pretty much what my issue is, but here is a short version. I study abroad, and plan to do so for at least 5 more years. Thus, I got a new bank account and a phone number, but my Apple ID is still set to my home country region (which supports less of Apples services), since, as far as I know, should I change the region and the credit card of my Apple ID, I would loose all my previous purchases, which go a decade back. So I plan to open a second Apple ID, but I do not know how to manage both of them, especially since I have multiple apple devices. As a primary ID I would probably have to keep using my original one, since all of the cloud and almost 2TB of data are bound to it.

My second concern is the connection between an Apple Watch and an iPhone, where I would have to use the new one, because only the new one would enable me Fitness+ subscription. Would I have to completely switch to the new one on the iPhone? Is there an option to quickly change Apple IDs to which the watch is bound to?

I apologise if all of this sounds confusing, but would really appreciate any advice you have.

I wish you best regards and a great day!

 

[chriscl]

Welcome to the particular hell that comes from dealing with a company - Apple - who don’t seem to understand that for many users, particularly those in Europe, where cross-border movement is frequent, that this is absolutely *a thing*.

The problem is that although you can have as many Apple accounts as you want in different countries, there’s no way to link these together (same as a „Family“) when they are in different nations. If you try, you get the unhelpful hint that you must change them to the same country. And if you want to sign in and out of each individual account, of course, you can do that, but it removes all sorts of useful things (like Apple Pay) that you have to set up again, every time. That gets very boring, very quickly.

The biggest issue (as you have found) is that there is no way to transfer subscriptions; the only option is to cancel them (but then you have to wait until the last one times-out) and renew them. And that doesn’t work, unless you’re incredibly fortunate to have all your subscriptions run to the same dates.

This is really - in 2022 - something they should address. There is absolutely no reason why you should not be able to combine two accounts in different countries, as long as you have a valid payment method for that country.

It should not be this difficult for a company with such a global reach, but clearly, for some reason it is.