Apple says its working on allowing merging of Apple IDs

An Apple executive relations employee is reported to have called an irate customer to inform him that Apple was working on allowing the merging of Apple IDs, according to a post by MacRumors.

MacRumors reader Robert emailed Apple CEO Tim Cook wanting to know if there was a solution for the problem of multiple Apple IDs and claims to have received the aforementioned phone call in reply. The Apple employee told him that, while the company did not currently offer any way to merge different Apple IDs, it was working on a solution for the problem.

The problem, for those not in the know, is that Apple’s automatic downloading feature for iTunes in the Cloud only works on any given device with a single Apple ID at a time. Once a device is associated with an Apple ID, it cannot do so with any other for the next 90 days.

This is a significant problem for a lot of iTunes Store and MobileMe customers who’ve traditionally used a separate Apple ID for each of those services. Since the company does not currently allow the merging of those IDs, and makes switching between them on the fly so difficult, users have had to stick to making purchases from the iTunes Store with a single account.

Now that we know that the company is aware of the problem and is working on a fix, hopefully we’ll soon be able to either merge two Apple IDs into one or, better yet, switch between them seamlessly as we use them both individually to shop on the iTunes Store.