6

I have recently purchased Growl for handling my notifications. I had enabled my account from Greece since I was living there years ago before I got my mac. Now I have moved to Denmark and I followed the relevant procedure for changing country. Finally I purchased software after I switched my account to Denmark.

The issues come when there are updates for the software I bought. I am getting a message saying:

To update this application, sign in to the account you used to upgrade it.

I followed the instructions from here and now App Store doesn't even recognize I have spend money on software and asks me again to purchase it.

How can I configure my App Store account properly so I don't have these issues?

3
  • Did you originally buy Growl through Apple's App store? Or did you buy it through some other means? Feb 7, 2012 at 15:00
  • I got it from AppStore version 1.3.2 and I want to upgrade it to 1.3.3 as its suggested by a notification at Growl :s
    – Chris-Top
    Feb 7, 2012 at 17:53
  • 1
    I'm getting this for all my apps including Xcode, but I haven't moved countries.
    – Stu Wilson
    Feb 7, 2012 at 18:19

2 Answers 2

2

The solution is to keep 2 separate AppleID accounts:

  1. One for the country you used to live in, with a valid address for that country. Credit Card may be expired as it's not needed for updates.
  2. Another for the country you live in now with your current details.

I've had a long email conversation with Apple re the subject, but they don't allow for purchase transfers between countries. They treat each country's store as a separate entity with no option to transfer purchases between.

Unfortunately this means, that in order to get an update for the apps which are attached to different AppleIDs you have to log out and log back in with different details. This is a bit of an inconvenience, but still cheaper than buying all the apps again.

1
  • You have to do this even if it's in the same country in my experience. That is, if you look at all the app updates available it will be less than what the badge says on the iTunes (10) sidebar because it is polling updates from all user accounts, but since you can only log in to one at a time, you can only 'download-all free updates' from one account at a time too. Apr 23, 2013 at 18:53
0

If by 'switching account' you mean that you created a new one for the new country you live in, I believe that was a mistake. Two accounts are two different identities for Apple, hence the software that was bought by the first person should not be used by the second. Why didn't you use the 'Change Country or Region' feature of iTunes? On MacOS, it's under Store > View My Account.

You must log in to answer this question.

Not the answer you're looking for? Browse other questions tagged .