Hacker News Reader

When changing country on iCloud, did you lose all your purchases (apart from subscriptions)? Like books, apps, movies…

I lost some but not most of my movies. Same for apps. Music was the worst, but on Apple Music so not purchases (just had to re-add a lot of things to my library).

It has to do with how the individual content (film, app, song) is licensed. If the same content has a separate license in the new country, it won’t carry over.

Also note this means it will depend on the two countries you are moving between (ie. I went US > UK, and I would guess there is a lot more licensing crossover between these two countries, whereas two others may not have so much).

And this is why I flat-out will not buy digital content unless:

1. It's DRM-Free.

2. I can remove the DRM. (All iTunes movies released prior to 2020 fall into this category.)

3. It's cheap enough that I can treat it like a rental; I fully expect to loose access after a few years and anything longer is a bonus.

No. The only thing I lost was my entire music library. All other purchases remained, from what I can tell.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com