90 Macworld • December 2019FEATURE
in the various stores in one country after you’ve
shifted your registration to another unless you’ve
downloaded those items before you change your
billing to a method that has an address in a new
country. (Apple doesn’t delete your content, though
a 2018 viral tweet made it seem like the company
might. What happened is that someone purchased
movies in one country and couldn’t redownload
the identical movies in another. This is still
ridiculous, but less horrible.)
One way around this country-based limit is if
you can maintain payment methods in the two (or
more) countries in which you have made and plan
to make purchases that have billing addresses in
those countries. You can set up separate Apple
IDs for each, and use content via those IDs. You
may be routinely prompted to enter the Apple ID
and password that’s not your default for iTunes
and the Mac App Store whenever you try to play
or launch associated purchases that rely on that
other ID, however.
With multiple IDs, Apple does let you change a
store’s login, even if they’re registered to different
countries, making an entirely different set of
content and apps available. However, Apple can
restrict switching to once per 90 days on a given
device after you use certain iTunes features on that
device, which include downloading and playing
movies, music, and TV shows, logging into Apple
Music, or downloading past purchases in any store.
Affected devices that can be locked to a single
Apple ID for 90 days include iPhones, iPads and